Photo: Arizona Snowbowl
I’m pretty confident every skier and snowboarder in the western United States was hopefully repeating the words “Miracle March” over and over as the 2026 calendar flipped past February. Winter had been slow, to say the least, and just about every resort in the West had an anemic snowpack. Maybe, just maybe a proper winter was going to arrive late and some March storms would turn it all around.
We got the hottest March on record in the contiguous U.S. instead. It didn’t just not snow, Mother Nature made sure to melt just about anything that had stuck to the ground in January and February. So no, we didn’t get a Miracle March, but at least one resort got a unique April miracle thanks to last weekend’s storm, albeit a small one.
Arizona Snowbowl had planned to close the books on this warm and dry season on April 12, already outlasting several resorts in places like California and Colorado, for example. The resort held a bonus weekend on Saturday the 11th and Sunday the 12th in the midst of an April storm, and seemingly wrapped up the Winter of 2025-2026.
“As one of the southernmost ski areas in the country, we’re proud to have stayed open into April this season,” Angie Grubb, marketing manager at Arizona Snowbowl said in an email before the planned April 12 closing day. “That reflects the hard work of our team and the support of our guests. We’re grateful to everyone who came out to ski and ride with us this season.”
Photo: Arizona Snowbowl
“Mother Nature had other plans,” was a phrase many resort officials repeated everywhere this season when applauding the hard work of operations teams grinding to keep terrain open against high temps and little or no snowfall. For once, at least, that phrase worked in somebody’s favor when the OpenSnow forecast convinced Snowbowl to re-open for a final two days, April 14 and April 15.
“April 12 was a wonderful closing day, but of course, we can’t call it quits when we know we’ve got fresh snow in the forecast,” the resort announced.
Snowbowl saw somewhere in the ballpark of 150 inches this season. An average year for the southernmost ski hill in the U.S. is around 260 inches, so while the brief April dump isn’t going to put them anywhere near totals for a typical year, at least some folks got to enjoy a couple more days of turns. And no, tickets aren’t $300. The resort was advertising tickets for its final days as low as $12.
