‘Hidden gem’: Mt. Spokane Ski and Snowboard Park opens for the season

Just after 9 a.m. Wednesday, the chairlift slowed down.

Jim van Loben Sels, the general manager of the Mt. Spokane Ski and Snowboard Park, and another staffer stretched a “First Chair” banner across the off-ramp for the lift. Seconds later, the first two skiers of the year left their chairs and grabbed the banner, posed for a quick photo and skied off.

With that, the season at Spokane’s local ski hill officially began. Two by two, more skiers and snowboarders followed, turning right or left to make their first runs of the season.

Only three of the park’s seven lifts were open, and there were signs warning people that the mountain has “early season conditions,” but the enthusiasm was palpable, even in the parking lot. Cars lined the parking lot by about 8 a.m., about an hour before the lifts were scheduled to start, and the people just kept coming.

“It’s the excitement,” van Loben Sels said. “The first day, everybody’s just antsy.”

Mt. Spokane’s opening came 11 days later than ski hill managers had hoped, an adjustment forced by a lack of snow. It’s been a relatively light winter, and ski hills throughout the region were forced to delay their openings.

Lookout Pass, Silver Mountain, Schweitzer and 49 Degrees North were all open by Dec. 3, but warm temperatures and rain have led to stops and starts in their operations.

At Mt. Spokane, van Loben Sels said they opted to wait out the warm spell and hope to avoid the stops and starts other resorts have been forced into.

“We were like, ‘We’re not going to open until we know we can do it,’ ” he said.

The ski hill’s staff and volunteers spent much of the past few weeks preparing to open. They used short barriers to catch blowing snow and moved it around a little, shoring up areas that needed help. They packed down snow when it fell, making a base for the runs.

In the hours before the lifts started running, groomers got the runs ready, putting a corduroy pattern in the snow. Lift crews knocked snow off the chairs. Signage went up, and pads were placed at the base of the lift towers. A crew put the final touches on one of the mountain’s terrain parks.

Fog shrouded the bottom of the mountain early in the day. About halfway up the Parkway Express lift, however, chairs popped out of the clouds and into blue skies and sunshine.

Vegetation poked through the snow in some spots, and some dirt was visible. The mountain had about 15 inches of snow at the base and about 28 inches at the summit, according to its website.

Still, van Loben Sels felt good about the snow they had Wednesday.

“This is actually decent coverage, even though there’s still some brown showing,” he said.

The skiers and snowboarders who showed up appeared to feel the same, though some of them brought the skis or boards they didn’t mind getting scratched up.

Michael Price was one of those skiers. He’s 72, and he said he was probably the oldest guy there.

“I’ve been skiing here forever,” Price said.

It’s where he learned to ski in the 1980s, after he got a job running the lifts there.

“It’s the way I stay healthy in the winter,” Price said.

Dave Dubuque, who lives in Spokane, said he comes to the mountain “any day that work allows.”

He has a season pass, and though he occasionally makes a trip elsewhere, he keeps coming back to Mt. Spokane.

“It’s a hidden gem,” Dubuque said. “It’s my favorite place on Earth.”