With all of us looking for things to do outside this winter, could the pandemic actually be the best thing to happen to local mountains since snowmaking in April—or are New England’s already-fragile ski resorts heading for a wipeout?
The pivot to work—and school—from home, meanwhile, has allowed for a flexibility most families have never known. “Resorts have been trying for years to get people to ski midweek,” says Dave Belin of RRC Associates, a Boulder, Colorado–based market research firm that covers the ski industry, “and all it took was a global pandemic.”
All of this, however, may as well be written in snow. At press time, two months before mountains are expected to open, plans were shifting rapidly and many scenarios may need to be scrapped altogether once skiers actually arrive.