Snow woes close Turner Mountain

The board of Kootenai Winter Sports Inc. decided Monday to pull the plug on the ski season and close Turner Mountain until next year. The ski area near Libby has not been open to skiers since Jan. 31 due to weather conditions.

“Mother Nature won this round, but there’s always next year,” Kootenai Winter Sports board president Bruce Zwang said of the closure.

Snowpack in the Kootenai River Basin dipped to 59 percent of normal this week.

This was a tough season for Turner Mountain even before the mountain opened. A fire tore through the groomer shed Dec. 4, destroying parts and equipment.

Ski enthusiast and volunteer Scott Kirschenmann was credited with saving the season at that point. Kirschenmann saved the two expensive and vital groomers from the fire.

The mountain did not receive adequate snowfall for opening until Dec. 29, a week behind its normal opening time.

Zwang said weather early this year created even more problems for Turner. As temperatures rose during the day, typical freezing did not occur at night. As that warming trend continued, the mountain’s snowpack gradually dwindled.

The depleted base was worsened by wet weather in late January and early February. “The base just wasn’t strong enough, after the warm temperatures, to survive the wet weather,” he said.

The decision to close the mountain means skiers were only able to enjoy 18 days at Turner Mountain this year. A normal season, Zwang said, has 54 days of skiing.

“We get years like this every once in a while, but we get through them and we’ll get through this,” Zwang said.

A similar weather situation happened 10 years ago, board member Jon Jeresek recalled. “We were able to ski for only four days in 2005,” he said.

Both Zwang and Jeresek stressed the end of the season as just that, the end of a season. “This sort of thing makes us tough,” Zwang said. “But we’ll hunker down and ride it out and we’ll be back next year.”

Jeresek, who is employed by the United States Forest Service, said he has spoken with one of the service’s hydrologists who firmly believes in the five-year weather cycle.

“If you look at the hydrographs from 2005 and 2015, they’re virtually identical. There was a dry spell that lasted until the end of March or early April, and then a big storm hit. I’ll bet we’re going to see that again this year,” Jeresek said.

He was disappointed with the need to close the mountain for the year, but said it had to be done. People are taking advantage of the warmer weather and have moved on to other activities.

“Even with a change in the weather and a good snow storm, it would be tough to attract enough people back to the mountain to make it financially viable to reopen,” he said.

Turner Mountain is more susceptible to weather fluctuations than many larger ski areas in other parts of Montana and the nation because they rely entirely upon natural snow, they have neither the equipment nor the infrastructure to make snow for skiing.

“The infrastructure needs would be hugely economically prohibitive for us. We could not bear the financial side of making snow,” Jeresek said.