Ski resorts, like many other activities and sectors, are not immune to the emergency situation due to extreme drought. They are also suffering their own ordeal. Although in the snow business, the bill paid for the lack of precipitation is more or less large depending on the snow we have.
While some resorts are having a hard time, with losses of skiers, others have reached the middle of the season with very satisfactory figures, so much so that they even point to new records at the end of the campaign.
The explanation? There is a transfer of skiers. “That is normal when there is a desire to ski and this is a client who does not hesitate to change destinations to go to the resort that offers the best conditions,” says Joaquim Alsina, director of the Associació Catalana d’Estacions de Muntanya (ACEM).
So the paradox is written in stations like Baqueira-Beret, which is recording one of its best seasons, in an extremely dry winter.
But this reality is considered from the snow sector – given the conditions that the Catalan resort presents for skiing compared to other resorts – as “something very logical and normal.” That complex is receiving clients from other seasons this winter, with less snow.
This trend (at the start of the campaign with very little snow and in which, for example, the Aragón stations of the Aramón Group could not open doors) was already confirmed during the Christmas holidays. Xavier Ubeira, commercial director of the station, reported after Three Kings' Day that this complex had received “12% more visitors these holidays than last year at this same time.”
This does not mean, it must be clarified, that in a season as dry and exceptional as this one the number of skiers increases globally. The clients who gain resorts like Aranese – with more than one hundred kilometers of open slopes – lose the resorts that have only been able to open, at this point in the season, half or less of their ski areas. They are the majority from the Catalan and Aragonese Pyrenees.
Only Andorra and especially Pas de la Casa – a station with an Atlantic climate like Baqueira-Beret – is weathering the season with better figures than expected at the start of the campaign.
This transfer of skiers between resorts is not new. In fact, in the last long weekends of the Constitution, “the escape” of those fans who make their reservations well in advance to resorts in the Alps has increased, believing that snow is now more guaranteed there at earlier dates. That premise is not always fulfilled.
And Baqueira, for example, has also suffered some seasonal “leaks” of clients to resorts as close as Boí-Taüll, when in the mountains of Alta Ribagorça there is more snow than in the Aranese mountains.
Although, as the sector highlights, not everything is a matter of climate. “Investments in snow production systems are paying off, especially in winters as dry as this one,” says Joaquim Alsina.
And also the work of the teams “who take care of the little snow they have so as not to lose or waste a flake,” is emphasized by the sector. They know a lot about this in Baqueira, a station that has not hesitated, for example, to move snow between sectors to remove it from where there is excess and take it to where it is missing. “Fifteen machines work, in two shifts, from five in the afternoon to nine in the morning,” repeats Ubeira.
The result? “The skier now finds himself, even if there is little snow, with slopes in perfect conditions for practicing the activity,” adds Alsina. That is precisely what has allowed the entire ski sector to save this Christmas, with a satisfactory influx at a global level in this complicated situation.
This is only confirmed by those who visit the resorts, because with all the information that is falling regarding the extreme drought and the news about the measures due to the exceptional emergency, many ski fans are thinking about it this year before scheduling an outing to the resort. snow.
“There is a widespread paranoia outside the Pyrenees, with the message that it is impossible to ski in such a dry winter,” confirms Xavi Ubieira. And that is reducing the influx of skiers to all resorts. “The surprise of that most incredulous customer is enormous when he arrives at the station and verifies, in the case of Baqueira-Beret, that we have more than one hundred kilometers of track.
