Santas assemble atop Little Whiteface Mountain on Sunday as part of the ski resort’s annual Santa Sunday. About 800 Santas turned out this year — a record for the event in its seventh year.
(Provided photo — Whiteface Mountain)
WILMINGTON — Around 800 Santas hit the slopes of Whiteface Mountain for the annual “Santa Sunday.”
The event offers free lift tickets for the day to anyone who shows up in a Santa suit. The ski center has hosted the event each year beginning in 2015 — except for 2020 and 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lauren Garfield, Whiteface’s sales and marketing director, said Santa Sunday began as a part of — and in conjunction with — Lake Placid’s Holiday Village Stroll.
“It’s really fun to be able to be involved (with the Holiday Village Stroll) at the mountain,” she said. “People can come up for the whole weekend, do everything in town and have a great ski day on top of that.”
As of Sunday afternoon, 739 lift tickets were given out from the event, according to Garfield. While she did not have the exact number of season pass holders who joined in as Santas, Garfield said it pushed the total number of Santa skiers and riders north of 800 — a record.
She said that beyond getting to ski Whiteface free for the day, people are drawn to Santa Sunday for its holiday cheer and sense of comradery on the slopes.
“They just have such a ball being up here on the slopes being dressed up, getting to be part of that Santa Community,” Garfield said.
Garfield attributed 2024 being the event’s banner year, so far, to a variety of factors: namely good weather and good trail conditions.
“Our conditions are amazing right now. … and it’s a beautiful day,” she said. “It was a bit chilly this morning, but that’s OK. Those Santas were extra warm with their outfits over their normal ski suits. People have been saying that they’ve been having a great time today.”
Garfield said not only did the mountain get lucky with Sunday’s weather, but it’s been a favorable lead-up to the event, with several days of snow and cold following the mid-week thaw.
“We had that bad weather during the middle of last week, and then Mother Nature turned it around,” she said. “We picked up over a foot of snow since then.”
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Face Lift comes in clutch
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Garfield said the ski center’s snowmakers and trail groomers have been working relentlessly to bolster conditions. She said this has put the mountain in a better position than where it usually is for mid-December, noting that the mountain has more terrain open than what is normal for this time of year.
She also credited logistical creativity on the part of mountain personnel for adding longevity to the season. In particular, being able to use the Face Lift, one of the mountain’s two high-speed detachable chairlifts, to “download,” or transport skiers and riders from trails closer to the mountain’s summit that had enough snow to open back down to the base throughout much of November.
Face Lift runs from the mountain’s base area at approximately 1,220 feet to its upper terminal at about 2,536 feet, according to Garfield. She said Face lift is not typically used to transport skiers back downhill. Normally, the mountain’s operating plan uses a different plan when lower elevation terrain is not able to be opened, relying on the Little Whiteface lift, which begins at about 2,100 feet to return guests to the Cloudsplitter Gondola for downloading.
“Typically, you go up the gondola, you ski down to the summit lift, you (ski or snowboard) the summit (area terrain, accessible from that lift) throughout the day,” Garfield said. “Then you ski down to the Little Whiteface lift, take that back up to the gondola, then download the gondola to the base.”
Throughout much of November, Garfield said weather conditions were specifically stubborn, permitting skiing higher up on the mountain but precluding ski resort officials from being able to open a portion of the trail from the Summit lift to the Little Whiteface lift — an elevation slice of approximately 450 vertical feet — where it remained elusively too warm to make or groom snow and in so doing, complete the usual skiable path of terrain.
Realizing this, mountain personnel modified the circuit by substituting Face Lift, which ends adjacent to where the Summit Lift begins and travels over the segment of terrain between the Summit Lift and the Little Whiteface Lift that wasn’t able to be open.
Face Lift, however, is not typically used for downloading. Garfield emphasized the lift is fully capable of doing so from a safety perspective, and was tested before it opened to guests. Getting the chairlift ready required extra work, including constructing a staircase for people to load in the reverse direction.
“It took some extra work on our part getting that lift prepared for that kind of downloading, but it added those first two weekends to our season,” she said. “At first there was no thought that we’d be able to open on Nov. 15 with how warm the fall was. But once we saw we could get the top (of the mountain) going, we really all made a concerted effort to do whatever it took to get it open and make it work.”
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Going forward
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The mountain operations staff has keep an eagle eye on the weather, according to Garfield. They’ve tried to maximize their impact with snow-making and grooming based on the hand they’ve been dealt.
“We watch the temperatures super closely,” she said. “We have multiple weather platforms that we check, including one that we check that is a service that we pay for that is specific toward snowmaking.”
During freeze-thaw cycles, mountain staff are extremely deliberate with the timing that they groom trails, she said. Often, staff will wait to groom trails, letting the water drain out of the snow beforehand. Garfield said this can sometimes create confusion among skiers and riders as to why certain trails are ungroomed and — sometimes as a result — closed.
If trails get groomed too early between the thaw and the freeze, the surface retains too much water, which leads to a sheet of ice, as opposed to the groomer being able to “chew up” the surface and return it to a fluffier snow consistency, according to Garfield.
“There’s definitely a science to it,” she said. “Sometimes, something will be closed because we need an extra day to let it drain. It’s a preservation method.”
Garfield said the mountain was in a good spot and that she was cautiously optimistic that operations would keep chugging along at Whiteface as the holiday season ramps up.
“Knock on wood, you know how superstitious us ski area people are, everything is going great,” she said. “Between snowmaking, grooming and lift operations, all of those systems are operating and doing what they need to do.”
For more information, including the latest trail conditions, visit whiteface.com.
