Maine winter tourism grows despite shorter, warmer seasons
Photo / Courtesy, Saddleback Mountain
Saddleback Mountain, shown here, last winter couldn't find enough employees to keep up with business at the Rangeley ski resort.
Maine’s summer tourism season gets a lot of attention, but recent winter tourism numbers show that travelers don't sleep when the snow flies.
The state saw a 9.3% jump in the number of tourists last winter, as tallied from December 2023 through April 2024 by the Maine Office of Tourism in its season evaluation. The office estimates that just under 4.37 million visitors spent over $2 billion in the state during those months. About one-fifth of the tourists were from other parts of Maine.
The increases come on top of notable gains during the 2023 winter season, when the office says Maine drew 15% more visitors than during the same period in 2022.
Roughly half of those travelers, the report finds, came for the state’s “active outdoor activities,” such as hiking, skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling or snowshoeing, or for “water activities” like fishing.
“What you see in Maine is that winter sports are incredibly important,” says Carolann Ouellette, the tourism office’s director of tourism, film, and outdoor recreation. “They're a big element of the Maine winter experience and the state's economy.”
However, winters are warming up due to climate change, and that could make it difficult for visitors to enjoy activities that rely on snow and ice.
“The past four years in Maine have been among the warmest … definitely, cause for some alarm,” says Katie Giannakopoulos, a meteorology expert and the coastal dynamics research associate at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
“Winter specifically is, in the Northeast, the fastest-warming season, and so winters now are about two weeks shorter in comparison to the last century.”
Some outdoor recreation companies say they’re experiencing even shorter winter seasons than that.
Russell Walters, the president of Northern Outdoors, says his four-season resort in the Forks plantation in Somerset County has seen shorter winters and “perhaps less consistent conditions,” although the number of visitors in a seven- or eight-week season has been about the same as when the season was close to 12 weeks.
“In and of itself, that’s pretty challenging … because now you're trying to do as much as you once did with all those guests that came over 12 weeks in seven weeks, which puts incredible pressure on staffing, on your availability of lodging, and on the trails themselves,” says Walters. “It's definitely a concern.”
At Saddleback Mountain in Rangeley, P.J. McSparran notes how the ski resort's business over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend hasn’t been bankable for years. The director of sales and marketing remembers “when [he] first got into this in the mid-to-late 1990s, lots of ski areas were able to open by the end of November.”
Saddleback, he says, opens some trails in the last week of that month, and has hit a target opening date of the first weekend in December for the past four years. But McSparran points out that the resort also will typically “rely on snow-making technology to get us going in the early season” and to open enough trails for visitors with varying terrain preference.
When the Fort Kent Outdoor Center hosted the U.S. Biathlon Championships this past March, it was the first time the center had to make snow at that time of year, explains Carl Theriault, a member of the center’s board of directors.
While he says he’s reassured that Fort Kent still generally sees strong snowpack conditions, he worries about how the experience further south might affect visitors.
“The impact of people in southern New England and Maine gets felt by us as well, because if people don't see snow in their backyard, all of a sudden they stop skiing, and they stop traveling,” said Theriault. That in turn, he worries, could limit who grows up loving snow-dependent activities.
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