Scotland Posts 99K Skier Visits in 22-23 Season
Scotland Posts 99K Skier Visits in 22-23 Season
Published : 29-Jun-2023 07:21
The Scotsman newspaper has reported that Scotland's five centres posted a combined 98,989 skier days for the 2022-23 season.
For context, the best season of the 21st century was 2009-10 which saw all areas open consistently through the winter and a total of 374,789 skier days.
By contrast the worst seasons, besides pandemic closed ones, 2016-17 and 2018-19 both saw around 54,000 skier days.
The 22-23 season got off to a fairly good start in January with most centres at least partially open and Glencoe doing particularly well reporting a base of more than a metre and for a few weeks all runs open. The Lecht is pictured top on January 20th.
However a mild spell late in the month led to a dramatic reduction to just a few short runs open, usually maintained by all-weather snowmaking machines. Glenshee is pictured below by 28 January. So most of the 98,989 skier days were recorded in the first third of the season.
That's different to the usual model of Scottish ski hill snow build-up which often delivers the best conditions by the latter half of the season in spring. This year the snow kept melting each time it fell and the only build up was way above the lower half of ski slopes.
Writing in The Scotsman, Roger Cox noted that Glencoe has 12,169 skier and snowboarder visits, but sold 18,020 tickets to people buying access chair tickets to use their 75 metre long sledging slope, maintained with their all-weather TechnoAlpin SnowFactory machine which was maintained through to April long after the ski slopes had lost adequate snow cover.
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