If things go according to plan, we will be skiing in a month. With the warm afternoons, that’s a little hard to believe, but things will change quickly. 

Park City opens Nov. 21, and Deer Valley has a season pass holder opening on Nov. 29 and 30, with the general opening on Dec. 1. 

I’m already thinking about it. The bike gear is boxed and on the top shelf and ski gear moved down into the drawers. I’ve pretty much located the gear, including the crappy gloves I intended to throw away at the end of last season, and the season before that. Duct tape offers very little insulation value. This might be the year to replace them. Then I looked at the prices. More tape.

As best I can tell, there’s no snowmaking going on. It’s not very productive when it’s 60 degrees in the afternoons and barely freezing at night. 

There’s a lot of work to do. A month is a long time. Deer Valley is still deep in construction, trying to get eight new lifts up and running and miles of new runs plumbed, wired and graded. I think building a ski run these days is about as complicated as building a residential street, given the utilities buried in both. 

Canyons has a huge parking structure to get functioning. I suspect the resorts are just fine with a couple more weeks of good construction weather.

There are employees to hire and train, systems to test, and a whole lot of stuff that has to fall into place. 

Things got off to a rocky start last year with the thin snowpack and similar warm temperatures. The ski patrol strike only made it worse. So let’s hope the employees are more gruntled than last season, Mother Nature cooperates a little better, ICE doesn’t kick down the doors of the kitchens and lodging operations, and things get off on the right foot.

Which brings us to the weather. The official forecasts are all over the place, with a developing La Nina in the Pacific. Depending on which map you look at, we are either in for a warm, dry winter again or snow like we’ve never seen before. 

Sometimes the same forecast will be inconsistent, showing one map that says “more snow” pushing into the Wasatch, then immediately going to another map that shows “equal chances” of the winter being wetter or drier than normal. I guess if you call it both ways, you are bound to be right.

I firmly believe in the hornet nest theory. The higher up the trees the hornets build their nests, the deeper the snow will be. It’s hard to see the nests when the leaves are on the trees, but they are mostly gone now, so I went hornet hunting. The hornets have been thick around my place all summer, so there should be a million nests to survey for a definitive weather prediction. 

There aren’t any. There were a couple early in the season that were ominously low to the ground, no better than shoulder height. There was one outside my office window, fairly high off the ground, but still in the lower half of the aspen tree it built in. All of those got obliterated in the first snowstorm. I’ve found a couple more on the ground, waterlogged and smashed. It’s impossible to know where they came from.

I walked up and down the river bottom, scouting the trees where there usually are lots of nests. I was so focused on the upper reaches of the trees, searching for hornet nests, that I didn’t see a cow moose in front of me. 

My dog gave a sort of tentative “woof?” that got my attention, and the moose’s. Equally startled, we parted ways.  She hopped a fence, and was joined by a calf coming out of the woods. The dogs and I decided there were no hornet nests in that vicinity and made a quick retreat.

The hornet hunting resumed on another path, and still nothing. The recent cold snap and snowstorm may have done them in. There were no nests to be found, high, low or in between.  

We are on our own, left with nothing other than actual science as a guide. And the scientists all got laid off in the shutdown.  

The hornets aren’t always a reliable forecast. They occasionally behave strangely. Last year’s forecast was thrown off by choking smoke from the Yellow Lake Fire. The hornets packed up and left. 

In October of 2023, they built their nests at the very tops of the trees and we had a very heavy snow year. 

In 2022, we had a different variety of hornets. They were black with a white stripe on their faces, and mean. They built their nests inside buildings where swinging a door open would knock them down. Not predictive of anything other than a banner year for Benadryl sales.

The scientific forecasts all seem to lean toward “equal chances” or “normal” winter conditions. There is no such thing as “normal” winter weather. So there’s nothing to do but plan on winter being what it is, hoping for snow and taking what we get. 

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.