BEN EOIN, N.S. — Nova Scotia ski hill business is expected to go downhill as a result of recently-implemented COVID-19-related public health restrictions in the province’s largest urban area.
Tighter restrictions were announced late last week after a surge of new positive coronavirus cases in parts of the Halifax Regional Municipality and neighbouring communities. Nova Scotians are also being encouraged to stay home and avoid all non-essential travel within the province, especially to and from restricted areas of the HRM, Hants and Lunenburg counties.
For the province’s four ski and snowboard hills, the travel restrictions could not have come at a worse time as Nova Scotia students will be on March break during the third week of the month.
“Mother Nature hasn’t been too favourable to us this winter and now we’re at the mercy of COVID and the public health measures on travel,” said Darcy MacDonald, general manager at Ski Ben Eoin, a downhill facility that overlooks the Bras d’Or Lake about 26 km southwest of Sydney.
“We haven’t had any of the school visits we are used to having. We haven’t had any students through the school board yet this year, so I don’t know yet how that is going to affect our March break. The restrictions put in place in Halifax will hurt us because we would have seen quite a few visitors come down from that area, so this March break may look a little different than we anticipated.”
Cape Breton’s other downhill ski and snowboard hill, Cape Smokey, is in a similar situation. Like Ben Eoin, the Ingonish Beach year-round recreational facility often pays the price for being located in a maritime climate where snow can quickly turn to rain as the temperatures rise.
However, according to Cape Smokey Holding Ltd. marketing director Anna Solomon, the irony now is that the hill with the spectacular ocean vistas has finally been blessed with some consistent recent snowfalls only to be hit with the news that visitors from the mainland are unlikely to be heading that way in March.
“It’s certainly tricky with the new restrictions since they are a little bit ambiguous in terms of what they mean by travel,” said Solomon. “Is a day-event considered travel? They (the province) haven’t shut the ski hills down but they have told people not to travel so there is a little bit of ambiguity to it.
“But we’ve been lucky with the snow. Last week we consistently had about five centimetres of snow each day and then on Saturday night we had about 15 centimetres, so we’re getting a great snow base from top to bottom. The entire hill has been groomed even though it is only the poma lift that is running. It’s perfect carving conditions.”
Solomon added that the entire hill was groomed for last weekend’s scheduled downhill mountain bike race that was cancelled due to the new restrictions.
“The bike race was scheduled for Sunday but we knew that a lot of the participants were planning on coming down from Halifax and to run it would not have been fair to them because we want it to be an inclusive event,” she said.
While the updated travel restrictions will likely hurt the bottom line of the two Cape Breton hills, it will probably be felt even more so at the two mainland venues (Martock near Windsor and Ski Wentworth north of Truro) that are much closer to the Halifax area’s large population base.
In the meantime, the ski hills will do their best to stay open and offer up the best conditions possible for those who are able to hit the slopes while adhering to the public health measures. And for Ski Ben Eoin, that means a bout of cold weather to enable the hill’s snow-making equipment to do its job.
“We need minus 5 C temperatures to make snow, but we ‘ve been ending up with minus 2 lately and that’s just not cold to give us the help we need to make snow,” said MacDonald.
Cape Smokey doesn’t have a snow-making system in place, but according to Solomon, it should have one installed by next season which should lead to a much earlier opening date than has been the case in recent years.
David Jala is a business reporter at the Cape Breton Post.
