I found this on Syracuse online this am....
Read it here also... For Tug Hill, it's not easy being green
Friday, January 05, 2007
By Hart Seely
Staff writer From the lunch counter of her family's restaurant along state Route 177, Janice Hodkinson gazed out at all the wrong colors.
In January, Barnes Corners should be white.
"On a normal weekday, that parking lot would be packed with trucks and trailers and snowmobilers," Hodkinson said. "But I'll tell you something: You can't make it snow."
Across the Tug Hill Plateau, where folks measure a storm by its inches-per-hour, a balmy winter is rapidly melting the hopes for those who earn their living by turning white stuff into green.
The Tug Hill's snowmobile and skiing industry a collection of restaurants, motels, resorts, trail-groomers and their suppliers is watching its 12-week economic window evaporate under the sun.
Already, businesses have lost the seven-day stretch between Christmas and New Year's, affectionately known as "Hell Week" because of its heavy traffic. If this weather continues, even though most Upstate New Yorkers will bask in the warmth, the area's winter tourism industry could face a small disaster.
"Business is bad, very bad, compared to what it would be," said Sue Lucas, owner of the Montague Inn in the Lewis County town of Montague.
"We are getting local business, but compared to what it would have been last week if we'd had snow, it's just unbelievable."
Certainly, one night of lake-effect snow would put Tug Hill back in business. But those lost seven days of Christmas won't come back.
"We've never had a season quite like this," said Hodkinson, who runs Hodkinson's Grill, known locally as "Louie's," after her 86-year-old father. "We've only had about three days of snowfall. But the kids weren't out of school when it happened. Last week, with the kids out of school, it should have been our biggest week of the season."
Instead, it fell victim to a warming trend, which stems from a convergence of two Northern Hemispheric weather patterns, said Kathryn Vreeland, climatologist at Cornell University's Northeast Regional Climate Center.
The El Nino pattern, a warming of the Pacific Ocean, traditionally means warm winters for the Northeast.
"The general upper air flow over the eastern part of the U.S. has been pretty much flowing from west to east," Vreeland said. "It has not been allowing the intrusion of cold air from the arctic."
It could persist until some Canadian air mass barges its way into the picture, she said,
Even then, the Tug Hill could be facing that occasional light winter.
Vreeland's preliminary data shows that the village of Lowville, which sits on the Tug Hill's eastern edge, recorded only 11.2 inches of snow last month. That's its lowest December snowfall since 1994, when 8.6 inches was recorded.
In an average December, Lowville gets 31.2 inches.
In some of the higher elevations of Montague, tree-shaded roads this week held a thin cover of ice. Here, residents still recall the 77 inches measured over 24 hours on Jan. 12, 1997, which seemed to have set an all-time record, until the National Weather Service questioned the protocol and refused to recognize the total.
Then there was the winter of 1995-96, when 4 feet landed on the Oswego County town of Redfield in less than one day. By Jan. 12 of that year, Redfield had received 168 inches of snowfall, a winter that lured snow enthusiasts from across the nation.
Around Barnes Corners this week, folks said a big whiteout was long overdue.
"My fear is that this area may be one of the only ones that gets snow," said Gary R. Stinson, president of the Barnes Corners Snow Pals, a snowmobile club with about 900 members. "That would mean huge traffic up here."
Stinson's club maintains 103 miles of snowmobile trails, connecting the towns of Adams, Montague and Copenhagen. He recalled that last January, after a warm stretch suddenly turned into heavy blizzards, an avalanche of snowmobilers arrived from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Western New York. Counters that month on some trails measured traffic flows of 30,000 vehicles numbers that went off the charts.
When the snow does hit, the hordes come fast.
But this year, the snow hasn't yet begun.
"There was a little burst," Stinson said, standing in a barn beside two huge $100,000 groomer machines. "The sleds went out and got it packed down pretty good. It would have been a beautiful base and then we lost it. We still haven't groomed the trails. Thus far, the machines have been washed, and that's about it . . .
At the Montague Inn, which has 14 lodging units and restaurant seating for 100, Lucas estimated that the lack of snow over Christmas week will lower her business gross revenues by 20 percent.
Her staff, which would normally number more than 20, was working a spring schedule, with only eight on duty. But the Tug Hill was pulling together.
"I just had a customer call from Lowville, and they booked a 20-person reservation for dinner Friday night," Lucas said. "They normally would never do that, because they'd know that we're packed with snowmobilers. You just don't make up for a loss like this, but our local people are very supportive."
