Lately around Spokane it’s been getting to look a lot like springtime, but if you head out of town there are still plenty of places to go this balmy January in search of winter fun.
In fact if you’re looking to go tubing you only have to go as far as the Bear Creek Lodge in Mead, where their tubing hill is open for business and they don’t need the unseasonably warm weather to cooperate with their operations.
“We get four inches of hard snow pack and we’re good,” Bear Creek Lodge owner Sam Deal said.
That’s about all you need to go tubing, but lately four inches of snow has been hard to come by. With green grass and run off, it looks more like the middle of April instead of the middle of January at Bear Creek Lodge.
The secret to keeping the tubing hill open is having a snow machine. According to Deal the snow on the tubing hill is “probably 90-percent man made.”
Deal says in 2002 they had an El Nino winter and he almost lost the lodge. This year they installed a snow making machine to prepare for what was predicted to be a warm, dry winter and he is thankful he did.
“We have been able to run a lot longer than we would without it,” he said.
Thanks to his snow machine, Sam Deal has been able to cash in on what would have been a slow season.
A couple miles up the road from Mead is Mt. Spokane, where the parking lot is a muddy, slushy mess but was packed with vehicles.
“We hear a lot from town in the past couple of weeks ‘Oh you don't want to go up to the mountain the conditions are awful’ but they’re not,” Kristin Whitaker said.
In fact people on the mountain Monday said the conditions up on the slopes were actually ideal.
“Wonderful, wonderful, you can see forever, great temperature,” Randy Osborne said.
Most people think warm temperatures and snow don't mix but mountain staff say this year the snow has kept falling. Just this last Thursday Mt. Spokane got six inches of fresh snow.
With school out for the Martin Luther King holiday many people who were at first skeptical about what conditions would be like on the mountain were glad they kept their faith in old man winter by grabbing their gear – coats optional – to spend Monday hitting the slopes and soaking up the sun.
“There was more than I thought there would be,” Osborne said.
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