About 4 p.m. Sunday, the chair lift cables stopped whirring. The instructors stopped teaching. The kids stopped playing.
Meanwhile, the snow kept melting.
Diamond Peak Ski Resort stands officially shut down for the 2007-2008 ski season, with records for rental sales and total revenue and one of the highest skier visit totals ever under its belt.
But Sunday wasn’t just the day Diamond Peak closed, if you ask Ed Youmans, general manager of the resort. On Sunday, the mountain began its run toward the 2008-2009 ski season.
“It started the day we closed,” said Youmans, when asked when preparations begin. “The guys are already working on the lifts.”
Diamond Peak’s estimated revenue from this past season is $6,020,581, and coming with that is an estimated operating profit of $800,000. That’s 15 percent ahead of average in terms of dollars, said Milena Regos, Incline Village General Improvement District marketing director.
Furthermore, skier visit totals closed at a whopping 127,668, 11 percent above the anticipated average of 115,000 visits.
“This was the best skier visits season in 10 years,” Regos said.
These high number were in large part to Mother Nature, which dumped feet of snow on the Lake Tahoe Basin and Diamond Peak this winter, including a January that saw an amount of snow that many people said they hadn’t seen in Tahoe in year.
But Regos pointed to the resort’s marketing campaign this year, a “Your Tahoe Place: For Kids” theme designed to attract children and families, as a large contributor to the high numbers.
“I’m looking forward to continuing our competitive advantage with the kids campaign; it was a huge success this season,” she said. “If Mother Nature is good to us next year, we should continue to experience strong skier visits.”
Next year started Sunday, Youmans said, with not only preparations for the ‘08-‘09 season, but also for phase one of the Diamond Peak renovation project.
Last week, the IVGID Board of Trustees approved phase one of the project — renovation of the main lodge — for a total price tag of $4,031,031.
Construction is slated to begin May 1 and be done by Sept. 15, the duration of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency grading season.
That remains on schedule, Youmans said.
“We have the lodge completely cleaned out,” he said Thursday. “We actually had to lay off the workers because they got it done a lot earlier than expected.”
Phase one of the project will expand food and beverage services, rental equipment services and seating capacity inside and outside. According to a Diamond Peak press release, the resort’s strategy with this renovation is to offer more efficient service to their customers as well as take advantage of the increased revenue opportunities that will come from the expanded services.
“The base lodge renovation will help tremendously with our customer service experience,” Regos said.
Youmans agreed.
“The greatest focus of this project is to be better at accommodating our larger crowds on busy days, which is basically every weekend,” he said. “It’s really about better serving that capacity.”
Phase two of the project, which includes constructing a child ski center, is slated to take place and finish during the 2009 TRPA season.