Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Several California ski resorts are calling it quits after the historic heat wave we had last week.

Sierra at Tahoe and Tahoe at Donner shut down their slopes yesterday, while Homewood closed its 2025, 26 season last Tuesday, bringing the number of closures across the state, including Dodge Ridge

and Mount Shasta earlier this month, to around eight. Resorts can typically stay open to mid-April

and sometimes later. The early closures come after a late start to the season, making it one of

the shortest in a decade for some ski parks. This hour, we look at what the tough ski season tells us about the long-term future of

these California resorts and the outlook for this year's snowpack and wildfires.

Joining me is Brian Allegretto, California forecaster for open snow and the lead forecaster for

Ski California. Brian, welcome to forum. Thank you. Thank

for having me. So it's been a roller coaster of a ski season. Brian, walk us through it,

beginning with, you know, that late start back in December. We started really wet in November,

but warm. It's been a season of warm. So we had a lot of rain and high

elevation snow in November and then went into a dry and mild period in beginning of December,

which made it really hard for ski areas to get a lot of snowmaking in in the beginning of the season.

But we got big cold snowstorms just in time between the Christmas and New Year's holiday.

And so that saved everyone.

It opened this year, I think most of them, almost completely. So they had a late start. Some of

them didn't open until middle of December, but everything looked good going into January. But then

we had another month-long dry spell until the third week of February.

And luckily the sun angles kind of lower that time of year, so we didn't get a lot of melting.

But then we had that huge storm that it was the second biggest five-day snowfall on record since

1982, the third week of February. It was very cold, snowed down to almost sea

level. And that got everyone back to average for the season, and everyone was celebrating, and it

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