At Camp Sagawau in suburban Lemont, employees are waxing 300 pairs of cross country skis for the winter season. They’ve got plenty of time for maintenance–without at least 4 inches of snow on the ground, the park can’t open for cross country skiing.
“We can’t open our trails until we have some snow on them,” said Leslie DeCourcey, a resource management aid who works at the park, part of the Cook County Forest Preserve.
Around the region, activities such as skiing, sledding, tobogganing, snowmobiling and ice fishing are on hold as Chicago waits for the first big snow of the season. For some, the warm weather simply means finding something else to do. For those with snow related businesses, it means taking a loss.
Even fake snow can’t survive the unseasonably warm weather. At Soldier Field, an artificial snow machine built into the sledding hill has stood idle this season. The machine was turned on just once–the Friday before Christmas–and that snow is gone, said Julian Green, a spokesman for the park district.
Temperatures need to be below freezing for the snow-making to be worthwhile.
But Green predicted there will be plenty of machine-made snow this winter for sledders to enjoy.
“We’re just in the beginning of the winter season,” he said. “Between January and March, the snow machine will get a lot of mileage.”
Tobogganers will have to wait for the real stuff. The Jensen Slides at Devon and Milwaukee Avenues and the Swallow Cliff run in Palos Park won’t open until it is 20 degrees or colder and there is at least 4 inches of snow on the ground, forest preserve officials said.
One cold weather activity that has seen a jump because of the balmier temperatures is ice skating.
Luke Pepin, the manager of the rink at Millennium Park, said the numbers go up at the ice rink when the temperature rises.
On Monday, when the high temperature passed 40 degrees, several hundred people were skating at Millennium Park by mid-morning. On Dec. 22, which was warm, 3,000 people were on the ice, Pepin said.
“People don’t like to go outside when it’s cold,” he said.
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Don’t put that shovel away yet
December is almost gone, and we’ve seen only 1.5 inches of snow. But that doesn’t mean we won’t get pounded later by the white stuff. A look at the snowfall for the last 10 Decembers and the total snowfall for that winter:
Sources: National Weather Service and Midwestern Regional Climate Center
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