South Okanagan ski resorts push through challenges of heavy snowfall

“It's havoc but it's also snow and we love snow. So it's a good-bad thing.”

The challenging weather over the past weekend has led to frozen lifts and downed trees, but in turn, the excellent conditions at South Okanagan ski resorts push through.

Heavy snowfall led to over 200 trees being overloaded and falling all over Apex Mountain Resort, which shut down the power across the hill.

“We were able to keep everything going as far as the lifts infrastructure but had to shut down the restaurants and we had power down to the resort for more than half the day on Sunday,” GM James Shalman said.

Rime ice also began forming on the chairs, cables, cell towers and power lines.

“It goes right on the cable that the chairs are trying to grab onto, so we can't have that. So we need to clear the rime off the entire cable of our high-speed detachable quad.”

Apex area residents have also been dealing with repairs of a cellular and internet service outage.

Baldy Mountain Resort saw similar complications plague their hill when several mature trees had fallen from the weight of accumulated snow, landing on critical power lines and causing a resort and village-wide power outage.

“We had a few flashbangs on transformers that went off,” Troy Lucas, operations manager with the resort said. “Where we struggled was with obviously getting the parts that are needed when something goes down because of a power outage, something in your chairlift mechanism.”

A staff member drove all the way to Vancouver and back to grab the replacement part, in order to get their main chair ready for operation the next day.

Lucas said they had to clear all the trees that had fallen on the runs to make sure it was safe for everyone and crews are working double time on the roads leading up the ski hill.

Adapting to changing conditions is all a part of the job for these resort operators.

“We are in a high alpine environment where it's 7200 feet above sea level at the top of Apex and we're in a mountain and weather happens and you're gonna see everything. Even in one day, we can see all kinds of different weather,” Shalman said. “We're used to this kind of stuff. But this was a weather event that was very unusual to have a 75-year-old tree snap.”

Lucas said that what's great about this industry is there is a pool of people to reach out to.

“So whether that’s us reaching out to James at Apex, do you have this part? Do you have that part or do you have this. It's kind of a pool of knowledge that everyone can help each other?”

And this much snow brings powder-hound conditions to the hill.

“The mountain is still in fantastic condition. The snow is amazing quality. So we're just trying to make the best of it,” Shalman said.

The little bit of warmer weather helped solidify the base that Apex has and fresh snow has now fallen on top, making it that much better.

Baldy is also set with quite a few centimetres of fresh snow ready to be groomed again and create some better skiing.

Both resorts have cleaned up and resumed full operations and are hoping for the snow to keep coming.