Photo courtesy of Wisp Resort. Wisp Resort’s 32 slopes and trails offers skier and snowboarders of all levels a challenging snow experience.

Published on: Tuesday, February 23, 2010

By Karen Carmichael, Special to the Sentinel

The rest of the region may still be digging out, but the record snowfalls that struck the Mid-Atlantic states in early February have proved a boon for the ski resorts of Maryland and southern Pennsylvania.

“We were out West for seven days and didn’t get a single snowflake,” Terrapin Ski and Snowboard Club President Brian Sturgeon said of a recent ski trip. “We come back home and we get three feet.”

“It’s been a pretty remarkable winter,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Eric Wilhelm said.

The greater Washington, D.C. area receives about 20-25 inches of snow during a normal winter, Wilhelm said. This year the district has gotten 55-60 inches of snow and Baltimore has received 80 inches. The mountains of western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, meanwhile, have already received over 100 inches of snow, he said.

“The snowfall translates to wonderful business for ski resorts,” said Lori Epp, director of marketing for Wisp Ski Resort in Western Maryland, which has recorded 190 inches of snowfall.

Wisp has seen a 46 percent increase in skier visits and a 28 percent increase in revenue compared to the same week of February last year, Epp said. The resort typically closes the last week in March, but with so much snow on the mountain it’s likely to stay open into early April, she said.

“With the Winter Olympics happening as well, I think that people are eager to learn winter sports,” Epp said. “They see how much fun it is and they’re very enthusiastic about what the United States teams are doing.”

The Terrapin Club at the University of Maryland in College Park doesn’t normally organize trips to local mountains because they’re smaller and “we don’t usually get good snow here,” Sturgeon said. “This much snow has definitely made it worth it.”

The club is getting ready for its next trip to the Catskills Mountains, but upstate New York has received half its normal snowfall while Maryland has received far more, Sturgeon said.

“We kind of want to stay here,” he said.

The February storms also dropped very light, fluffy snow, as opposed to the heavy wet snow Maryland usually receives due to East Coast humidity, Epp said. Skiers and snowboarders revel in the powder, she said, adding that these are the best skiing conditions she’s seen in seven years in Western Maryland.

Some resorts experienced a brief drop-off in business immediately after the storms hit, when many customers canceled their plans or were snowed in.

District resident Ben Lawson had planned a trip to Wisp in early January for the weekend of Feb. 5-7, when the first large snowstorm struck Maryland. Nine friends planned to go, “but only five of us made it because of the snow,” Lawson said.

With the help of four-wheel drive, they reached their secluded rental cabin five miles away from Wisp the night of Feb. 5, only to find themselves buried under well over a foot of snow the next morning.

“With two shovels and our snowboards, we dug for probably a total of 10 hours” to clear the driveway and the cabin’s private road, Lawson said. A passing snowplow allowed them to reach Wisp Saturday night, and by Sunday the slopes “seemed pretty full,” Lawson said.

Wisp had to expend a lot of labor to clear out the resort, but it had no real trouble swinging back into operation, Epp said.

“We’re a ski resort, that’s our business,” she said.

After digging out its swamped ski lifts, Roundtop Resort in Lewisberry, Pa., actually took its slope grooming equipment out onto the roads of York County to help clear them, said Marketing Director Chris Dudding.

Big snowstorms are rather rare in the resort’s location, Dudding said, and Roundtop usually has to make most of its own snow to cover the slopes. The February storms took care of that need.

“To have 40 inches of real powder around here is pretty remarkable,” Dudding said.

Located about 30 miles north of the Maryland border, Roundtop has seen a definite increase in its customers from Baltimore and northern Maryland since the storms hit, Dudding said.

“I think once they got dug out they’re thinking ‘We’re going to use this snow for something,’” Dudding said.

Overall business is up about 30 percent this year, he said. Business frequently falls off after President’s Day, he said, but thanks to the snowfall “right now it feels like midwinter around here.” The perception has brought out new skiers as well as kept regulars interested, Dudding said.

Both Whitetail and Liberty Resorts, also in southern Pennsylvania and owned by the same company as Roundtop, have reported good weeks, Dudding said, and many of the regional resorts are expecting continued brisk business.

“We’re looking to go into March like gangbusters,” Epp said.

“I am more motivated than ever to go out to the local mountains,” Sturgeon said, adding that he believes the mountains’ snow base has now reached 60 inches deep. “Normally we go all the way to Canada for that,” he said.

Area residents can likely expect even more snow in the weeks to come due to the continuing cold temperatures, Wilhelm said.

“When you have that much cold air, there’s probably a good chance we’ll get at least one or two more decent snows across the region,” he said.