Camden Snow Bowl prepares for a less snowy future

It’s not been easy operating one of the few ski areas in North America with an ocean view.

The Camden Snow Bowl has faced a number of issues in recent years, including deteriorating buildings, aging equipment that’s needed to be replaced and a lull in attendance after a pandemic boom.

Underlying all of those challenges, though, is a more existential one for the town-owned Snow Bowl on Ragged Mountain. Winters are getting warmer in Maine , and during recent seasons that has left the little ski area with a shortage of its most essential component.

That was painfully evident this winter, when warm, wet weather rapidly melted its snow and forced it to close for the season in early March, almost a month before it normally would.

The early warm-up eroded the snow skiers and snowboarders would use to ride the chairlifts, making them unusable, while the tubing hill was melted down to grass and Hosmer Pond had open water that prevented use of the toboggan chute, the Snow Bowl announced at the time .

Now, the town’s parks and recreation department is contending with the financial blow from shorter winters. It’s also trying to start the long-term process of turning Ragged Mountain into more of a year-round destination that can stay viable even as winters less reliably deliver snow.

“There is no way to predict the weather in advance of the season, and no simple solution for mitigating the potential financial impacts of warm/rainy/windy winters,” the parks and recreation  department recently said in a memo to the Select Board .

Holly Anderson, who manages the Snow Bowl for the town, said even if it rains on days the park isn’t open, the ensuing snowmelt and standing water has made it hard for people to use the mountain and for staff to move snow around.

“If we get into the teens, we can make a boatload of snow in a very short amount of time, like just in a couple of days,” Anderson said. “A lot of this is dependent on when mother nature wants to give us some cold weather.”

The weather hasn’t been the only challenge.

Years of deferred maintenance on the park infrastructure has recently led to some expensive work, Anderson said. That included the demolition of a portable structure that had housed a shop and the race program, which meant spending $10,000 on carrying away the debris, and the rental of a snow groomer to replace the park’s when it broke down, at a cost of $40,000.

But the lack of snow has made it harder to manage those costs. The Snow Bowl has had substantial deficits in the last two seasons, including $80,000 last year and $340,000 this year. This year, Anderson estimates it could have made an additional $75,000 to $150,000 if it could have stayed open through March.

“The factor playing the largest role in increasing operating costs/decreasing revenues at the Snow Bowl is the increasingly warm, rainy winters,” the parks department said in its memo to the Select Board.

To make up for those deficits in the short-term, the Snow Bowl will be asking Camden voters whether to pay them off using surplus funds, according to the Courier-Gazette .

It also plans to hike its regular operating budget by almost 6 percent, to $1.2 million, and raise the fees customers must pay to use the park, Anderson said. Ski day passes — which were $48 — will cost about $52 next season. Tubing day passes will increase from $10 to $15, and the park will institute a new tubing season pass. The park also aims to secure more paid sponsorships.

Anderson is hoping the weather will cooperate a bit more in the coming winters. But even if it doesn’t, she’s pushing for a new plan that will eventually allow the mountain to operate sustainably, without the need to rely on taxpayers.

Part of the solution, she said, will be to make Ragged Mountain a more year-round destination, with activities outside the ski season that bring in the revenue lost to shorter winters.

What exactly that looks like, Anderson doesn’t know yet. In April, the town applied for a roughly $150,000 federal grant to fund workshops and public listening sessions to collect more ideas for those year-round opportunities.

While the Snow Bowl had hoped to build a new lodge as part of a series of upgrades a decade ago, it never came to fruition, and Anderson says that’s something that could help now, serving as a year-round community center that hosts events, concerts and other activities such as yoga.

“I mean, we could have a real restaurant out here with a bar with live music, and we could have, you know, Friday nights to be out here at the Snow Bowl, or Saturday night at the Snow Bowl,” Anderson said. “And there’s lots of possibilities, but this new lodge is really what we need to be able to do that.”

Jules Walkup is a Report for America corps member. Additional support for this reporting is provided by BDN readers.