Arapahoe Basin snags first-to-open distinction, kicking off Colorado ski season

SUMMIT COUNTY — Owen Melson got the call at 9 a.m. Wednesday: Arapahoe Basin is about to open. 

His first stop was to buy a grill. “We were out of the door at Lowe’s by 9:15,” Melson said. Second stop: City Market, where he shoved 80 sausage patties and bags full of eggs, cheese, bagels, English muffins and waffles into the car next to his new 28-inch Blackstone griddle and headed for the mountain.

By about 10:15 a.m. he was handing out free breakfast sandwiches at the base right as the first chairlift to start spinning in Colorado hauled skiers and snowboarders to the top of a single blue run.

“I was told I’d get like two days’ notice,” said Melson, who lives nearby in Silverthorne. “But it’s fine, we probably wouldn’t have done much differently. Maybe cooked a few more sandwiches.”

Alan Henceroth, the chief operating officer of Arapahoe Basin, had made the call to open less than 24 hours prior.

“Generally we know about how much snow it takes to open, and so we track the volume really closely. As we get close then we’re on the ground, skiing, walking, the cat drivers start pushing it around,” Henceroth said from the side of the lift line Wednesday morning, where he cheered, waved and high-fived the skiers sliding through. “All the employees are talking to one another. The snowmakers, the cat drivers, the groomers, the lift crew, ski patrol. Then we’re like, ‘we’re ready.’”

The team held off on the announcement until 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, then posted to their Instagram that the first lifts would start at 11. They started spinning about a half hour early. “We had all these people ready in line, and we just decided to open,” Henceroth shrugged, gesturing at the handful of people a few laps deep by 10:45 a.m.

Arapahoe Basin started blowing snow Oct. 15, the same day Keystone around the corner fired up its snow guns. The brown, dried hillsides on both sides of the Continental Divide were shocked with white and by the next day only scraggly tops of the taller shrubs showed through on the resort’s main runs. Then midweek came and the mountain warmed up and the snow guns shut off.

“Such is the nature of trying to make snow in October in Colorado,” said Jacob Marquardt, communications manager for Keystone. “These things happen.”

Still, the first flakes had flown — and been posted to social media — and excitement around opening day started to swell. Keystone, like Arapahoe Basin, doesn’t announce an opening date ahead of time, sticking instead to a single, winking line: “as soon as possible.”

“I always say the marketing teams of ski areas are like the most popular kids in school right now,” said Shayna Silverman, senior communications manager at Arapahoe Basin, the day before they opened. “Everyone’s constantly texting us, asking when we’re opening. I’d say more than ever people are really excited to get out on the hill. We deserve a good winter after last year.”

Since at least the 1980s, Keystone has been locked in a friendly competition with nearby Loveland and Arapahoe Basin to be the first resort to open in the state and, often, in the nation.

For years the race was pretty much exclusively between Keystone and Loveland, both of which grabbed the title 10 times over the two decades between 1982 and 2001.

It’s as much a battle of technologies as it is of favorable conditions, since snowmaking equipment enabled both resorts to open their slopes sometimes months before the rest of Colorado’s resorts. Keystone even slid in a couple of wins by flipping on overhead lights and opening before sunrise, a few hours ahead of Loveland.

In 2002, Arapahoe Basin got the go-ahead from the resort owners and the Army Corps of Engineers to install their own snowmaking equipment. Since then, Arapahoe Basin has been first to open 14 times, more than Loveland and Keystone combined during that same period.

All three resorts know that the race for first chair is motivating to the various on-mountain teams — and makes for good high country bar banter — but none are willing to open until they are confident they can stay open. A weekend storm set to melt out by midweek isn’t enough to turn lifts.

“It’s cool to be a part of that conversation and the narrative, and it’s always awesome for whoever gets to claim the title,” said Loryn Roberson, marketing and communications director for Loveland. “But you can’t rush perfection.”

Ready, set …

The snow guns signal the visible start of the season, but by the time they’re turned on, resorts have put in weeks of preparation — temps have been checked relentlessly, debris cleared, lifts serviced, ski patrol trained, seasonal staff hired, menus written, passes printed, scanners scanning and snowcats readied to roll.

Then they wait to hear “Go.”

“It happens really fast,” Roberson, at Loveland, said. “Even the most internal teams won’t know until maybe three days before, two days sometimes.”

At Arapahoe Basin, they might get four or five hours’ notice. “Last year was the most relaxed opening I’ve ever experienced,” Silverman said. “We had 36 hours.” This year it was about 22 hours.

A major part of a successful opening day is timing the snowmaking just right. Tilting that scale toward precipitation has been in the business plan for Colorado resorts since the 1960s, when Aspen, Vail and other companies started contracting cloud seeding companies.

In 1966, Loveland owner Chet Upham and general manager Otto Werlin repurposed diesel air compressors into some of the state’s first snow guns. They scaled up the operation a few years later using diesel compressors left over from blasting out the Eisenhower Tunnel.

These days, only three of the major mountains don’t employ snowmaking machines for at least part of the season: Silverton, Ski Cooper and Monarch Mountain. The rest are happy to augment Mother Nature by blasting their slopes with misty droplets as soon as they start to see consistent days around 27 degrees measured by the wet-bulb temperature, a combination of actual air temperature and humidity.

Keystone, which spans more than 3,000 vertical feet, rising from about 9,200 feet to over 12,000, can see widely varying temperatures depending on the elevation and angle of a run. It’s up to the mountain operations team to decide where to concentrate snowmaking depending on conditions, and the guns will automatically shut off if the temp rises above that ideal 27 to 28 degree wet-bulb range. “We don’t want to do anything in vain,” Marquardt said. “It has to be put toward the right use.”

Even though their machines are more high tech than most, it still takes expert deliberation to decide when and where to fire any number of Keystone’s 627 snow guns. For those interested, that’s 39 mobile fan guns, 30 tower fan guns, three arm-mounted fan guns, 375 automated air-water tower guns, 125 manual air-water tower guns, 55 manual air-water ground guns and approximately 70 miles of pipe.

Arapahoe Basin, on the other hand, keeps five people on staff to run the area’s 20 snow guns day and night, a scrappier operation that Silverman said helps keep the mountain nimble.

“Our philosophy at A-Basin seeps into every department: small but mighty and highly efficient,” she said. They use their snowmaking capabilities to “get a foothold,” then let Mother Nature take over.

Unlike A-Basin and Keystone, Loveland doesn’t have summer operations, so hiring looks a little different there. Its snowmaking team is run by contractors, many of them from New Zealand, who started work Oct. 8 and will stay with the mountain through the snowmaking season, usually around mid-December, Roberson said. “Then they move on and go make snow somewhere else.”

The day ones

Between last winter’s record lows, prolonged drought in the West and the promise of a Super El Niño, the outlook this season is nothing short of manic.

“Cautiously optimistic is a term that I’ve been using a lot,” Roberson said, before launching into data about snowfall at Loveland during the past 10 recorded El Niño years and changing her tune. “I am super optimistic though that even if it’s an average snow year, it’s going to be an incredible season, because we’re seeing a lot of pent-up demand.”

By noon Wednesday, the A-Basin lower parking lot, the bar at the base of the mountain and the lift line were packed. The free breakfast sandwiches were long gone. The official opening hour of North America’s ski season had arrived.

Next to the lift line, Phil Lindeman from Frisco-based radio station Krystal 93.9 blasted early 2000s hits and handed out “pocket bacon” that he was cooking in a cast iron pan.

“You are the ones out here,” Lindeman said over a loudspeaker, hyping up the growing crowd. “You can’t ski all season if you’re not here on day one.”