By Robert Upe and Tourism Reporter
Whitney Baxter gets one final taste of snow at Falls Creek.
The Victorian snow season officially closed yesterday, marking an end to a lacklustre winter in the snowfields. The season started with a flurry of snowfalls in June but hopes of a bumper year melted away with unusually warm temperatures during August.
The limited snowfalls forced resorts to rely on snowmaking technology to stay open.
Yesterday, on the final day of the season, only Falls Creek was operating, offering skiers a few patchy runs. Mount Buller and Mount Hotham closed a week earlier and some smaller resorts with limited snowmaking capacity, such as Mount Baw Baw and Lake Mountain, ran out of snow during August.
On the latest figures, overall visitor numbers to Victorian resorts fell from 764,936 last winter to 619,854, a decrease of 19 per cent.
Mount Stirling suffered the most with a visitor drop of 45 per cent. Lake Mountain is down 38 per cent, Mount Baw Baw 29 per cent, Mount Buller 18 per cent, Mount Hotham 11 per cent and Falls Creek 6 per cent.
However, based on 10-year averages, visitation is relatively steady with an overall decline of just 6 per cent.
"It's been a difficult season," the general manager of Falls Creek Ski Lifts Michael Callahan said.
"We had a good start, then only sporadic falls and a lot of snowmaking. Generally it has been pretty tough," he said.
Despite the drop in visitors, the chief executive officer of the Australian Ski Areas Association, Colin Hackworth, said it was a solid year for the resorts.
"It wasn't stellar for snowfalls but it was in the top-10 years of visitation of all time," he said.
"Snowmaking at the bigger resorts means that snow cover is very reliable these days for the 80 per cent of skiers who go on beginner or intermediate slopes," he said. "Snowmaking technology means we can ride out the storm (or lack of) and keep operating when previously we would have shut."
The general manager of Mount Buller Ski Lifts, Laurie Blampied, said the latter part of the season was testament to the value in snowmaking.
"If anyone needed an illustration of the difference it can make to a season and keeping skiers and boarders out on the slopes, this season has shown that," he said.
In NSW, snowfalls were also below expectations but Mr Hackworth said visitor figures will be buoyed by Perisher which was able to retain "good snow coverage all year because of its rolling terrain".
Perisher and Thredbo will close today, marking an end to the 15oth anniversary year of skiing in Australia.
Mr Hackworth said the industry is an essential part of Australian tourism. "It is collectively worth more than $1 billion and creates 10,000 jobs."
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