Scott Albright, staff writer

ENCHANTED CIRCLE — The snow season is about halfway over and skiers, boarders, snowbikers and the like have been lucky to have plenty of snow and awesome conditions on the slopes.
Visitors have had the opportunity to experience Angel Fire’s two terrain parks, the steep ridges of Red River and the deep powder in Taos Ski Valley. Marketing and ski school personnel have only good things to say about the first half of the snow year and are optimistic about the rest of the season.

Angel Fire
Dave Dekema, marketing director for the Angel Fire Resort, said the number of visitors to the resort is up by 26 percent compared to January of last year.
“We’re having a fantastic winter,” he said. “It’s the second best in ten years. I think only the 2002/2003 year had a higher visitor number.”
Dekema credits the consistent snowfall for the high turnout.
“We got a late start, but the fact that we’ve had so much of the mountain open is setting the momentum for this being a near-record year,” he said.
Dekema said return visitors add to the numbers, but he also said many hotel bookings occurred soon after Angel Fire received a lot of snow. He said the resort markets to areas within a 10 to 12 hour driving radius. The resort advertises extensively through the use of the radio, but also pushes in-state markets through food and beer product partners, as well as the print media.
“We’ve combined snow, traffic and ski reports on the radio,” he said. “You buy a full page print ad three months in advance and that’s what you get, but with radio we can react to conditions.”
Dekema said the resort hopes to see a large number of visitors during Presidents Day and Spring Break, but said it is the snow that would keep skiers and boarders returning to the mountain. He said the hotel is offering what he calls “bounce back incentives,” providing return visitors with deals on summer activities like golfing and mountain biking.
Dekema said visitors appreciate the family environment. He is hoping that future renovations will keep the skiers and boarders coming back for more snow and high-altitude air.
“It’s the quality of the trails that are open for skiing and snowboarding, and the family fun. It isn’t intimidating. There’s no risk of people getting lost in back country or skiing out of bounds and going off a cliff. It’s a well laid-out mountain with good skiing, boarding, grooming and snow conditions,” Dekema said.

Red River
Wally Dobbs, Red River ski school director, said ski school student numbers were up compared to last year.
“From the opening of the season to the end of January the student count is up 20 percent from last year, and last year was a good year,” Dobbs said.
He said school attendance numbers correlate with numbers of ski area visitors. He also said numbers were up because of the weather and new snow-making machines.
“Red River has been getting more snow, and it’s substantially colder,” Dobbs said. “We still have 30 to 40-foot mounds of man-made snow that we still haven’t pushed yet.”
He said the ski area has about 21 more snow guns than last year, putting the number of snow machines at 71. He said last year skiers and boarders were snowed out during peak times around Christmas. He said this year visitors had an easier time making it to town and had more time to relax while on vacation.
“Forty percent of the Christmas business was snowed out last year,” Dobbs said. “This year we had an additional week of Christmas. Schools started on January 7 instead of the third.”
Dobbs said the ski area saw an increase over the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, which he credits to the abundance of snow.
He said Red River Ski Area advertises on 35 radio stations that reach from the Texas Panhandle to Lubbock, and Oklahoma City to the east. He said those areas are the core market for visitors, but said the area also advertises in New Mexico and Colorado. He said the ski area had a 15 percent increase in advertising funds.
“The number one tool is radio,” he said.
Dobbs said the area has added starlight snowmobile tours, which have attracted new visitors. He said the next big events are Easter and Spring Break. During the Easter break visitors can ski with the Easter Bunny while searching for eggs on the slopes. Skiers and boarders who visit during Spring Break will be invited to participate in a beach themed-event, with visitors searching for hidden fish and lobsters on the slopes. Discounts and prizes will be given to those who find the hidden objects.
Dobbs looks forward to the rest of the season, and said the area is a great place for families to visit.
“Red River is a town with a ski area in the middle of it. It makes a difference,” he said. “It is a place where you can let the kids go ski and you know they’ll end up someplace.”
Dobbs said children tend to get lost in large ski areas.
“In Red River the kids can have a vacation and not be hand-in-hand with their parents,” he said.

Taos
“We haven’t seen conditions like this since the 70s,” Seth Bullington, Taos Ski Valley marketing director, said. “We have over a 100-inch base, and that’s normally what we have in March. Our early storms were really wet, so they adhered to the stones, so when the new storms came in it stuck really well. It feels like 200 inches. People are skiing places I’ve never seen before.”
Bullington said that since the area announced they are going to allow snowboarders on Wednesday, March 19, over 60,000 people have visited the ski area’s Web site blog.
“We’ve really pushed toward Web marketing compared to print. It seems to be the wave of the future,” Bullington said.
He added that the area didn’t have to market to new areas because the snow conditions did the advertising for them.
“We started off with some of the best snow in the nation,” he said.
Bullington said the next big attraction for visitors is the Third Annual Salomon Extreme Freeride Championships Thursday, March 6 through Saturday, March 8.
“We’ve added a special snowboarding category in that. That should be a lot of fun to watch,” he said. “A bunch of extreme skiers will be jumping off cliffs and doing amazing stuff,” he added.
Bullington said the whole village could undergo a revamping in the near future, and that the ski area may be open to mountain bikers over the summer. He also said a snowmobile competition might be added to next year’s events, with riders performing back flips and other tricks.
He said the one thing that keeps visitors coming back to the area is the hospitality.
“It’s the hospitality, it’s the people,” he said. “They like the short lift lines, how nice people are and that we really take good care of people.”