Skiing in Scotland: How Scottish ski resorts narrowly avoided their worst ever winter in 2023/4
The 2023/24 season was a challenging one for Scottish skiing, but there are still reasons to be optimistic, writes Roger Cox
Scotland’s ski resorts have now reported their visitor numbers for the 2023/24 season, and, well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news first: although it may have felt like it at times, last winter was not in fact Scotland’s worst ever winter for skiing – at least, not in terms of the number of skiers paying to access the five resorts.
The bad news, however, is that it might as well have been, as 2023/24 only beat the worst two winters on record by the slenderest of margins.
In total, the five Scottish resorts recorded just 55,000 skier days last season – that is, combined lift pass sales equivalent to 55,000 full-day passes. That’s just a smidge more than the 2018-19 season, when 54,481 skier days were recorded, and that in turn was only just enough to beat the worst season of all time, 2016-17, which saw just 54,000 skier days across the five resorts. So – fair to say that nobody in the Scottish ski industry will be chalking this up as a vintage year.
For context, the total number of skier days for the 2022/23 season was 86,100, while for the still-Covid-compromised 2021-22 season, it was 84,140. Meanwhile, the best snow years in the last couple of decades saw as many as 374,789 skier days (2009/10) and 290,996 skier days (2012-13), and as recently as 2016 there seemed to be some confusion in the media about whether the 207,770 skier days recorded in the 2015/16 season represented a good result or a bad one. (The BBC reporting at the time tended to emphasise the negatives, whereas the P&J report on the same stats chose to accentuate the positives.)
Last season’s numbers, then, for all that they don’t quite represent a new nadir, still suggest something of a crisis. Indeed, there now even seems to be a question mark over whether Scotland will still have five fully functioning ski centres come next winter.
As widely reported earlier in the year, the Lecht ski centre started up a Crowdfunder page at the end of the 2023/24 season, titled, “We’re raising £35,000 to help us continue to the future.”
The Crowdfunder page describes last season’s snow conditions as “dire” and says “We do not want to be forced to shut down the centre.” Supporters are invited to donate the cost of a one-day lift pass “to help secure the future of the Lecht.” As of Midsummer, the total raised stood at £26,920.
Still, not all of Scotland’s ski centres had such a tough time of it. Andy Meldrum, who runs the Glencoe Mountain resort, remains relatively upbeat.
“We did alright,” he says, “it wasn’t a bad season in the end. We skied most of the winter, from January right through to the first week in April.
“Most of that time we only had the upper mountain open, but some of that time we had the upper and the lower mountain open, although at no point in the season did we have the mid-mountain open, because that requires the most snow.
“The upper mountain was actually in pretty good nick for most of the time, but when you’ve not got a middle or a lower mountain then your skier numbers tend to be pretty poor.
“I think we skied 62 days in the end, and got around 10,000 skier days in total, so for a lean snow year it wasn’t too bad.”
This year’s figure at Glencoe doesn’t compare too badly with the approximately 12,000 skier days they clocked up in the 22/23 season, or even with the 16,000 they managed the season before.
Glenshee also did reasonably well last winter, this year’s approximately 27,000 skier days almost exactly equalling their total for the 22/23 season and only slightly down on the 30,000 they clocked up in 21/22.
“From Glenshee’s point of view, almost their whole season was on man-made snow,” says Meldrum, referring to the resort’s use of a SnowFactory – a shipping container-sized device which churns out ready-made snow.
“They had some pretty big days over the holiday period and, because they have a large SnowFactory and because of the way it’s set up, they can offer skiing [on man-made snow] for beginners and beginners-plus, so there’s a bit of a progression [for skiers].”
The other three resorts chose not to make their individual skier days tallies available this year, but with 37,000 of the 55,000 skier days total recorded this year coming from Glencoe and Glenshee, you don’t have to be a genius to work out that there were relatively slim pickings elsewhere.
With the three worst Scottish ski seasons on record all occurring in the last decade, it might be tempting to blame climate change for all this, but Meldrum isn’t so sure.
“We’ve always had good seasons and bad seasons, and if you look back over the last five or six years, the two Covid years, we all had exceptional snow cover from the start of the season to the end of the season. So, it looks like we’ve had about five bad seasons in a row, but we’ve not – the two Covid years we would’ve been skiing right through till May with full cover.”
Evidently, then, the story is more complicated than “climate change kills Scottish skiing.” If this season proved one thing, it’s that artificial snowmaking now has the potential to keep a resort like Glenshee going even in the leanest of snow years – and, of course, the law of averages suggests that we’re due a stellar snow year soon.