The lack of snow has made for a long, bleak winter for many local businesses.

Some restaurants, motels and hotels, and snow-dependent venues and services have lost revenue, cut staff or scaled back their operations due to a drop-off in winter tourism. Some say it’s the worst winter they’ve ever experienced.

“Never had a year like this, never,” said Dick Freeburg of Gabriels, who’s been renting snowmobiles and providing snowmobile tours in the area for 20 years.

What’s to blame? A slow start to winter, coupled with a string of warm spells and accompanying rain storms, including during the two busiest weeks of the winter.

And now it’s almost over, as the calendar turns over to March. Nevertheless, some people in the area’s tourism industry are hoping, for the sake of their bottom line, that there’s still some winter to come.

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Saranac Lake area

Seventy percent of winter business at Charlie’s Inn in Lake Clear comes from snowmobilers, so the lack of snow has had a “tremendous” impact, according to owner Jill Brockway.

“It has impacted us a lot,” she said. “People are canceling their reservations. We had only two good weekends so far for snow. Normally it’d be solid from January to March, three months and a good chunk of our business in the winter.

“We have the same sales people that go to all the business, and they said it’s affecting everybody. People aren’t ordering as much because they’re not as busy as they normally are.”

In the past, Brockway has brought in seasonal employees to cover the busy times in the winter. This season she’s just trying to hold on to the employees she has.

“They’re not making what they normally would make in tips because the people aren’t here, so I’m paying them more per hour just to keep them,” Brockway said.

Freeburg said his snowmobiling business has been shut down for two weeks. He’s calling downstate and New Jersey tourists every day to cancel their reservations because there isn’t enough snow to ride on.

“President’s week, in February, all of that was canceled,” he said. “We lost all of that. Christmas week, we lost half of that. We couldn’t start until three days after Christmas.”

A late start to winter, coupled with successive warm spells and rain storms in January and February, including one this week, have destroyed the snow base, Freeburg said.

“It literally melted our base, and that never happens,” he said. “It could rain a couple days and it doesn’t hurt anything because the base is there, but this year it took it away. Now we’re back to as if we we were at the beginning of December and we’re trying to get a base on.”

The lack of base has also been a problem for the Saranac Lake area’s skiing venues, although some are still holding on. A stepped-up snowmaking effort at Mount Pisgah, including a ton of snow made for this month’s Empire State Winter Games, has helped keep the alpine skiing and snowboarding mountain going. The Paul Smith’s College VIC, which has cross-country ski and snowshoeing trails, shut down for two days this week due to rain and icy conditions, but otherwise has remained open. It’s been tougher going at Dewey Mountain Recreation Center in Saranac Lake, where the nordic and snowshoeing trails have been closed for the last 10 days. The mountain has also had to postpone some of its programs.

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Tupper Lake

Tupper Lake businesses have also been feeling the effects of the “Winter That Wasn’t.” Big Tupper Ski Area, the all-volunteer mountain run by Adirondack Residents Intent on Saving their Economy that lacks the capability to make snow, announced earlier this month it would not open this season.

The mountain typically helps draw people to the area, and without it and other winter-themed activities like snowmobiling and cross-country skiing, it’s been a slow season.

“We don’t have skiing. We don’t have any snowmobiling. Thank God for the ice fishermen,” said Rick Donah, the manager of P2’s Irish Pub. “The amount of people traveling through the area is way down, so we just have to grin and bear it, pretty much.”

Donah said a winter music series he booked has been drawing locals on the weekends, but the bar’s winter-tourism related business has plummeted. He remained optimistic for the future, referring to the state’s plan to remove the railroad tracks and create a trail between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid, which the state has said will create better conditions for snowmobiling on the corridor and bring in more visitors to local communities.

Maggie Ernenwein, who owns the Park Motel, wrote via email that revenues are down at her business as well.

“Winter enthusiasts went to Canada,” she wrote. “And we totally lost our Canadian customers, although that could be the exchange rate.”

Heidi Schuller, whose son owns the 18-room Tupper Lake Motel, said the lodging facility has been empty every weekend there has not been an event in town, like the Northern Challenge Ice Fishing Derby. While Schuller said her family has only owned the business for a short time, she said it did much better last winter.

“There was a lot of snow. There were people coming here for skiing (and) cross-country skiing,” she said. “People call up, and they want to make reservations for skiing, and we have to tell them, ‘No, it’s not open. It’s not open.’ We have thousands of calls for the ski area here, Big Tupper.”

Schuller also said adding more public events like the Northern Challenge and the Fire and Ice Festival would help businesses.

“Every time there is an event, the whole motel is booked. But when there is nothing going on we don’t have anything.”

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Lake Placid area

In Lake Placid, the dip in business has been around 20 percent, several Main Street businesses said. Jill Cardinale, co-owner of The Pines of Lake Placid and the chairwoman of the board of the Lake Placid Business Association, said though skiing has been good at Whiteface, business is off, especially midweek.

With the lack of snow, Cardinale and others hope the spring mud season will be shorter and hikers will vacation sooner, helping to make up for winter season losses.

Kelsey Torrance-Cassidy, brewery manager at The Great Adirondack Steak and Seafood Brewing Company, said the establishment has also seen business decrease at around 20 percent. Despite the lack of snow, Main Street foot traffic and the restaurant’s relationship with returning vacationers such as CAN/AM hockey tournament participants has helped ease the decline.

Over at Cunningham’s Ski Barn, Assistant Manager Sean Robinson said this winter has been one of the worst he’s ever seen in terms of business. The frequent warm weather in major metropolitan areas like the Greater New York City area has also kept people away, he said.

“It’s the season that kind of never got started,” Robinson said. “The skiing is great, the problem is that people just don’t know that. The people that we are seeing are the people that come no matter what.”

The amount of foot traffic on Main Street this winter has been misleading for a shop like Cunningham’s, Robinson added, because the bulk of visitors have been vacationers in town for CAN/AM tournaments.

As for the Lake Placid ski venues, Cascade Cross-Country Ski Center Manager Jennifer Jubin said the center has been operating at about 50 percent overall this winter.

“(It’s) an urgent call to policy makers and everyone that Mother Nature is hurting and something needs to be done,” Jubin said. “It’s obvious the state of business and everything as we know it is changing rapidly, and we need to do something about it.”

The Olympic Regional Development Authority’s cross-country ski center, Mt. Van Hoevenberg, was last open on Feb. 15 and has also been forced to close numerous times throughout the season. Lacking the snowmaking ability of Whiteface, several events have been relocated to trails at the Olympic ski jumps.

At Whiteface Thursday, 62 of 88 trails were open, ORDA director of communications Jon Lundin said. Whiteface hasn’t been able to open more than 77 percent of its trails at any point this winter. Its Lookout Mountain lift and trails, which were added several years ago, haven’t opened at all. Skier visits are down, but Lundin stressed that Whiteface remaining open throughout the entire winter, given the weather, is a testament to the mountain’s snowmaking crew.

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Optimism?

The first day of spring is just over three weeks away, although winter always hangs on a little later in the Adirondacks. People in the tourism industry hope Mother Nature remembers us before it’s time to put away the skis and snowmobiles for the season.

“Hopefully, we have some snow,” Schuller. “If there is snow, we’ll have business.”

“I don’t know if it’s going to be much of a winter at all, but we’re hoping and praying,” Brockway said.