Brains
Daylight Saving Time… Regular Time… Which is better?
Would skiing and riding be better off if we stayed on Daylight Saving Time? If we stayed on it, could ski resorts open from 9 am to 5 pm every day? Maybe.
In Argentina, they don’t have Daylight Saving Time, and many ski resorts do open from 9 am to 4:30 or 5 pm. That extra hour of skiing and riding is huge.
Would a system like this work in the USA? Maybe. The only problem is that hand charges for avalanche control can’t be thrown until there’s “visibility” in the USA. In Argentina, the sun doesn’t come up until after 9 am in the dead of winter. That would make for some late openings on powder days in the US.
Love it or hate it, Daylight Saving Time started again yesterday and I missed that hour in bed…
We normal people don’t now the difference.
Know/notice
If the resort is open until 5:00, why would a 9:30~10:00 opening be “late” in the middle of winter? The only reason resorts “need” to open at 8:30~9:00 is convention.
The “reasonable” sunrise and sunset times on the charts are similarly arbitrary. I’d certainly much rather the sun rise at, say, 8:00 than set before 5:00 as it commonly does in the winter in the US. You really need to consider the whole picture as one, not the individual sunset and sunrise times.
Daylight savings just started not just ended. And I hate it. I don’t think it benefits skiing, what it does is make for an icier start to spring days. It needs to go away.
There’s nothing stoping the resorts from delaying opening, if that’s really better.
Realistically though, even with DST in effect, snow generally starts to refreeze by 3:00~3:30. And when it’s too late in the season for that to happen, the snow is going to be slush by then anyway. There’s a reason that even with DST, spring operational hours at any resort that knows what they’re doing get pushed earlier and earlier. 7:30-2:00 is not at all unusual. Do you really want to ski 6:30-1:00 instead?