Another month bites the dust

While the numbers may not be as staggering as they were after the months of January and February, the closing of March still brought a lot of good news for Incline's lone mountain skiing resort.

In March, Diamond Peak Ski Resort made almost $1.2 million in revenue, 17 percent more than the month's budgeted revenue total of $993,000, said Ed Youmans, general manager at Diamond Peak Ski Resort. The 2007-2008 season-to-date revenue, as of Tuesday, stands at about $5.9 million, well above the former revenue record of $4.7 million broken in February.

And, in what has become a celebratory broken record, skier visits continue to rise. The resort saw 28,917 skier visits in March, up 36 percent from the 18,537 skiers and riders it saw in March 2007. Skier visits for the season, as of Tuesday, sat at 124,368. That's an 8 percent increase from the budgeted long term average of 115,000 visits.

All of this comes after a month of March that saw almost no snow fall on the mountain.

"We basically had zero precipitation in March," Youmans said. "But I don't think that really made a difference. I think we got helped a lot by the timing if Easter this year, and the timing of (spring) breaks for all the schools."

At the beginning of March, the mountain had a base depth of 70 inches, with a peak depth of 115 inches. As of Tuesday, those numbers were down to 35 and 85 inches, respectively.

But despite the lack of snow, Youmans said the mountain is on pace finish the season at about $6 million in revenue (a record) and about 127,000 skier/rider visits, a number that would rank in the top five in the mountain's history.

Based on those numbers, Youmans said the mountain will stay open until its budgeted closing date on Sunday, April 13.

There was thought to keep the mountain open a week longer until April 20, he said. But a number factors, kept him from making that decision

"We know that Incline schools start their vacation on the 14th, but several things aren't going to let us stay open to the 20th," Youmans said. "With the snow pack going down, our skier visits are going to be dropping significantly, and we need to empty the lodge and make sure it is ready to work on by May 1, which is going to be hard enough to do by the 13th, let alone the 20th."

But despite the low snow total for March, the mountain still benefited greatly from the dumping it got in January, a month that Youmans sand many locals said was the biggest for snow in years.

Kayla Anderson, Incline Village General Improvement District Marketing Coordinator and Diamond Peak spokeswoman, agreed, saying the initial snow in January set the tone for a successful season, maybe more so than other mountain resorts in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

"In my opinion, it's really hard to tell whether we would have been able to set these records without the amount of snowfall we received in the beginning of the season," she said. "I've heard that other resorts haven't done as well as we have, so I don't believe that it's all due to the snowfall. I think that we offer a great product, and more people took advantage of it this season."