In late November, when Beaver Mountain unveiled its new Marge’s Cabin lodge with a community open house, a few inches of snow coated the ground. It was enough to allow skiers and snowboarders picking up their season rentals to test out their new gear on a small rise between the slopes and the base.
Then came the warm temperatures, with lows in the mid-40s. And the rains, four in total.
“Having a warm rain, you can just watch [the snow] disappearing,” co-owner Kristy Seeholzer said. “And it was hard, after it had all been covered, to see the grass appear again.”
For the first time in Seeholzer’s 33 years at the Bear Lake-area ski resort, Beaver Mountain didn’t open by Christmas. It was one of three established Utah resorts to miss the holiday surge due to low snowfall and unseasonably warm weather, joining Nordic Valley near Ogden and Cherry Peak in Logan. Even the resorts that opened struggled, though.
(Julie Jag | The Salt Lake Tribune) Beaver Mountain’s new Cabin sits at the foot of the Beaver’s Face Lift.
On Dec. 30, Park City Mountain — which has the most lift-served terrain in the United States — made just 34 of its 348 runs (9.8%) available to ski. And three weeks into the new year, Deer Valley Resort still hasn’t opened much of the new East Village terrain that it has been hyping since 2023.
As of last weekend, all 16 public Utah ski areas are turning their lifts. But they’re far from being full steam, and they won’t get much help from nature. There’s barely a flake of snow in the forecast for at least the next two weeks. AccuWeather’s extended forecast shows no chance of snow until the third week of February for both Park City and on the valley floor.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Guests at the base of Park City Mountain Resort on Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025.
As bad as this season is, though, it could be worse. Just ask the skiers who experienced the 1976-77 season.
“That’s the worst since Beaver opened,” said Ray Elliott, 74, who has been teaching skiing at Beaver since 1971. “’76-77 was the lack-of-snow year.”
That season, according to The Salt Lake Tribune archives, a mere 5 inches of snow had accumulated on the Silver Lake snow stake in Brighton as of Dec. 10. Measurements have been taken at the stake since 1935, and the article said the previous two lows, recorded at the end of December, were 12 inches in 1963 and 17 inches in 1960.
Seasonal tabulations from the Alta Guard House Automated Weather Station in Little Cottonwood Canyon show it was the driest season since 1945-46. With 314.5 inches, it was the second least snowy behind only the 287.2 inches recorded between October and May in 2017-18 (Of note, the ski-centric weather service OpenSnow just released its long-range outlook, which parallels that season to this one).
(Jan Brunvand) Skiers try to navigate around the dirt patches on a run at Snowbird in early 1977. The 1976-77 was one of the worst in Utah history.
As a result of that lack of snow during that 1976-77 season, just two of 11 ski areas were open for the holidays: Powder Mountain and Brian Head Resort. Most didn’t open until at least a week into the new year, after a hearty storm delivered much-needed — if insufficient — snow.
“People used to refer to having a pair of old ‘rock skis’ for early season,” 93-year-old Jan Brunvand, a frequent Snowbird skier, recalled in an email. “1976-77 was a year when it was wise to use your rock skis all season.”
Yet, just like this year — where Brighton got 74 inches in four days and Snowbasin is reporting 72 inches for the season — some ski areas enjoyed more of a bounty than others.
Beaver Mountain, in particular, got hung out to dry in 1976-77. Storms would appear in the distant forecast, only to fizzle out.
Elliott was attending Utah State and remembered studying on the lawn without a jacket that January and February. It wasn’t until Feb. 28, the day after he got married, that enough snow finally dropped in the northern Wasatch Mountains to allow Beaver Mountain to open.
Three weeks later, the ski area closed for the season.
(Jan Brunvand) Judy Brunvand takes in a view of the inversion in the Salt Lake Valley while skiing in a sweater at Snowbird in January or February 1977. The 1976-77 season was one of the worst in Utah history.
Marge Seeholzer — Beaver’s co-owner and grand dame — has clear memories of that season, Kristy Seeholzer said, and fears that the same fate will befall the 87-year ski area again.
“Marge,” she said, “was very nervous.”
Unlike most other Utah resorts, Beaver has not been able to hedge its bets against dry winters with snowmaking due to its lack of a reliable water source. Despite that handicap and the belated start, though, Elliott believes the Seeholzers won’t have any trouble keeping people on their skis and boards until at least April.
Beaver has a 43-inch base but likely won’t see a refill in the next 10 days, according to OpenSnow.com’s forecast. Even if it doesn’t, the Bear River Range is in relatively good shape at 84% of its annual snowpack. So, Elliott said, enough snow can now be collected among the trees to supplement the groomed runs.
“I’ve seen quite a few variations of good and bad and ugly, and this isn’t the worst,” he said. “In fact, this isn’t as bad as some of our poor years. It’s turning out to be pretty good.”