If the forecast holds, today (Thursday) may bring Traverse City’s first sign of snow of the winter. While accumulation isn’t predicted just yet, the arrival of the white stuff is music to the ears of local ski resort operators. Those businesses are coming off arguably the worst winter on record in northern Michigan, at least as it pertains to snow and outdoor recreation. Despite the historically mild 2023-24 season, though – and despite the fact that milder winters have become more common – local ski experts are feeling a surprising emotion as winter arrives again: optimism.

Last winter saw 11 record-breaking high temperature days in Traverse City, including the first 70-degree February day ever recorded. By the end of March, the area had gotten just 73.1 inches of snowfall for the entire season, about 30 inches shy of the average winter total. At peak, just 16 percent of the Great Lakes were covered in ice, compared to a 53 percent winter average. Local ski area Mt. Holiday opened for just two weeks of skiing all season.

Michigan wasn’t the only place to experience balmy weather: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ultimately dubbed 2023-24 “the warmest winter on record for the contiguous United States.” Still, things were so bad in the Mitten that 42 of the state’s 83 counties got federal drought declarations, enabling businesses “impacted by lack of snow” to apply for low-interest disaster relief loans from the Small Business Administration (SBA).

According to Mt. Holiday Executive Director Jim Pearson, those resources made it possible for the ski area to rally for another season.

“We ended up getting a SBA loan of about $480,000 to help us recover,” Pearson tells The Ticker. “That amount is probably about what we’ve lost over the last season from not being open. It allowed us to pay off a line of credit we’d opened just to get through the season, to cover things like payroll and bills.”

“We worked pretty hard to get that [disaster relief] for ski areas across Michigan,” says Mickey MacWilliams, executive director for the Michigan Snowsports Industries Association (MSIA). That trade association, which advocated for the drought declarations, has formally acknowledged climate change as “the greatest threat to our industry,” per MacWilliams. While last season was particularly bad – MSIA estimates the losses at $41 million across Michigan’s snowsports industry – MacWilliams says milder winters are becoming more common, forcing the state’s ski resorts to get “pretty darn resilient.”

One way they're doing that? Investing heavily in snowmaking infrastructure. At Mt. Holiday, Pearson says the team has been pouring effort and money – including ARPA dollars and a recent half-a-million-dollar donation from a “local family” – into a dramatic expansion of its snowmaking system.

That project involved installing 8,000 feet of new piping throughout the ski area, as well as 34 new hydrants and a whole new electrical system. Those upgrades will drive water and power to a fleet of 22 snow guns, an increase from the eight Mt. Holiday had last season. The older snow guns have been retrofitted and modernized, while the new ones are more powerful and efficient. Holiday’s system also now includes a few different types of snowmaking machines – directional “stick” guns, for instance, or “tower” guns mounted 20 feet up in the air – that Pearson says will diversify how and where Mt. Holiday can blanket its slopes in fresh powder.

Holiday’s upgrades also include a new pump house, capable of driving 800 gallons of water per minute into the snowmaking system. The water comes from a recently-dredged retention pond on Holiday's property, which Pearson says should have about 100,000 more gallons of capacity this season than last.

All told, Pearson says the new system will give Holiday “a whole lot more firepower” to get its runs open this winter, even if Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate.

While the area’s larger ski resorts didn’t take quite the hit Holiday did last year – representatives from both Shanty Creek and Crystal Mountain tell The Ticker they didn’t need to seek federal assistance – they’re still actively preparing for the next bad winter.

According to Lindsey Southwell, marketing director at Shanty Creek, one of the resort’s biggest offseason projects was “upgrading the valve systems under the mountain.” That tweak will allow workers to shut off and repair parts of the snowmaking line individually, without having to take the whole thing offline.

“Before, when there was a leak in the system, we’d have to turn off an entire line, which would cause us to lose precious snowmaking time,” Southwell explains. “Leaks happen with snowmaking; thousands of gallons of water at high pressure will find any weak spots in your lines. But now, we are able isolate the leak and at the same time continue to blow snow in the other areas, which is especially important when snowmaking opportunities are limited like they were last season.”

Crystal Mountain CEO John Melcher credits the resort’s “very robust snowmaking system” with enabling Crystal to run a full 120-day ski season last year. Skier visits were still down, though, which Melcher attributes more to consumer confidence than to the actual conditions on the slopes.

“Honestly, the big challenge we had was the weather reports,” Melcher says. “It became a media fixation to talk about weather challenges across the country – especially here in the Midwest – and I think that really shook the confidence of skiers."

The solution, Melcher says, was the classic mantra of “show, don’t tell.”

“We realized we needed to be better about promoting our webcams, so that people could take a look at the conditions on our slopes for themselves,” Melcher explains. “We really promoted our webcams last year, and the traffic for those pages was way up over the prior year. And so, we’ve added even more webcams this year. Because we understand that, if you’re down in Ohio and you’ve got green grass and people are playing golf, we really need to convince you that we’ve still got some good skiing conditions to offer you up here.”

Pictured: One of Mt. Holiday's brand-new snow guns (courtesy of Mt. Holiday)