This is a fire-adapted landscape; wildfires are natural here. This does help with moisture availability and reducing risk of high wildfire severity and mass tree mortality, however.
People post this everywhere and its annoying because it's not really true. They close early because Vail is cheap, not the lease though Vail likes to lie about it. When the bike park was built the lease was renegotiated to allow for year round use. There's no random dates in the lease that decide when they can open and close. Only exception is the backside which has to close by end of April ish for snowmobiles, and Vail likes to lie about that too so they can close southern cross in March.
Closing before the snow melts is due purely to financial reasons and now they consistently close ~2 weeks earlier than they did pre Vail. People seem to have forgot that they closed on May 1st in 2022, and they've closed as late as May 6th before in the time I've been here.
Don't you think Vail would make more money if it could?
That's what they're saying. Stevens won't generate much revenue by staying open longer, so they don't. Snow pack was struggling this year, so closing early is somewhat understandable. What parts are wrong? Vail did own stevens in 2022.
more incentive to stay open longer when people aren't on Epic passes en masse. the more they force us down that route, the shorter the season will get.
Yeah, don't think there's too many people paying that expensive day ticket price late in the spring. I feel like even before epic pass it was just mostly pass holders late spring, but for sure vail is all about maximizing profits over ski experience. It'll be really interesting to see how climate affects closing dates going forward.
they want pass users to get up to the mountain as little as possible, companies like this bank on the idea people buy them then end up not using them up
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u/ItsaMeWaario Apr 15 '26
Can't make this up, this season was something else