SNOWBASIN, Utah (ABC4) — These late-winter storms aren’t just breaking records, they’re smashing them. Snowbasin Resort is now celebrating its snowiest and longest season on record. Even then, the snow keeps coming and the newly established records are likely to continue to be broken.  

March 2023 was the snowiest month Snowbasin has ever seen. The ski resort received about 10 inches of new snow overnight, bringing the season total up to 562 inches, which means the snowfall total is nearly 100 inches more than the 40-year record that was broken a week earlier.    

Spring break is in full effect at Snowbasin, but it feels more like mid-winter.   

“We’re just breaking all sorts of records,” said General Manager Davy Ratchford. “It’s just never going to stop.”  

Ratchford, originally from Ireland, has held the title of general manager for five years and has called Utah home for much longer than that. He said this is the most snow he’s seen in his life.   

“Right now, we’re at 562 inches for the season,” Ratchford said. “The previous historic record was 475 inches, so we’ve kind of gone a little bit past that, but we’ll see where this takes us. It’s been an amazing winter.”

“It’s at a point where we don’t know what every day is going to be like because, at this level of snow, we have to hand dig out every lift. Just so the lifts can go through,” Ratchford added.   

On Monday, dozens of people took advantage of the fresh powder.

“It’s spring break!” Brian Hendrick exclaimed as his son, Max, excitedly stood next to him. “Spending time as a family. I mean, we kind of expected warm-sunny spring skiing, but we’ll take any powder day that we can get.”  

March is now the snowiest month on record for Snowbasin after more than 200 inches fell on the mountain. So far, April is packing a punch that feels just as hard.

“It’s pretty wild,” said Ratchford. “We never thought we’d be dealing with this much snow in history but now that we have it, we have a lot of people who are loving it.”  

Two of those people who were loving it are Brian and Max Kendricks.

“Unbelievable, like, middle-of-winter powder up to our knees,” Brian Kendricks said while pointing to Max. “The younger one, he quit skiing because it was burying him.”  

“In the ski industry, we obviously love the snow but there are things that we deal with,” Ratchford said. “Like where do we put it? It’s funny, we have the most amount of parking of any ski resort in Utah and we lose 30 percent of it with this much snow because where does the snow go?”  

Early and late winter storms have led to the longest season in Snowbasin history. The resort closes at the end of April. Many wonder why it isn’t staying open into May.

“I wish we could go longer but that’s the thing about it. Where do we get the people to run the lifts? At that point, we’re just running into other issues we deal with but we’re just happy to give people the longest season in history,” Ratchford said.