Feb. 11—TRAVERSE CITY — Michael Zaryczny moved some snow from a pile near Timberlee Hills’ parking lot to cover bare patches on the tubing hill as Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” played on the speakers inside the lodge.

The tubing hill and event venue’s owner used a tractor to scoop snow Friday from piles near the parking lot and move it to the tubing hill. He’s hoping he can make snow by Sunday or Monday once temperatures have dropped enough.

“We’ve only been open, I think, 10 days right now,” he said between passes with the tractor. “So it’s been very limited. I mean, we’ll be open normally that 10 days, if not more, during the Christmas break. So it’s, definitely we’re behind the eight-ball trying to pay catch-up, and the rain and warm weather did not help so far.”

An overnight rain Thursday further melted some of the snow Zaryczny pushed around earlier that day, one on which the temperature broke a daily record.

Traverse City’s high of 61 beat the old daily record of 52 set on Feb. 8, 1925, according to the National Weather Service.

It came amid a warmup that prompted weeks of disappointing news to fans of winter sports and pastimes, from the cancellation of what would’ve been the 48th Annual North American VASA ski and bicycle races near Traverse City to Gaylord’s Snowmobile Fest to the sturgeon fishing season on Black Lake south of Cheboygan, just to name a few.

Forecasts called for cooler weather in the coming week, but little to no snow, said NWS meteorologist Monique Runyan in Gaylord. Friday’s highs in the mid-40s were set to drop to highs in the low- to mid-30s for the next several days — still a bit warmer than average.

Families coming to Timberlee Hills from downstate canceled even when the Elmwood Township business was open for tubing, Zaryczny said. With no other winter activities to bring them in, they didn’t want to make the trip.

This is a trend that local ski shop manager, Eric Shutler, said he’s seen at the Don Orr Ski N’ Beach Haus this winter. Demand for downhill and cross-country ski and snowshoe rentals has been slower there than in the past.

“We are a climate-based industry,” he said. “Obviously, when there’s no snow on the ground, we can’t rent snowshoes and cross-country skis, it definitely helps when it’s cold and there’s white stuff on the ground, for sure.”

Anecdotally, Shutler said this year hasn’t been the worst he’s ever experienced, but it also definitely hasn’t been the best.

“There’s still snow that people are traveling for — whether it’s in a car or on an airplane, so we’re here to help their needs anyways,” Shulter said. “The local race kids are still racing. We can’t make snowmen outside, but people are still skiing.”

As the snow disappeared across the region, some road commissions put up a literal sign of the warmup: speed limits for seasonal weight-restricted roads.

“This is the earliest date I can remember when we had to impose weight restrictions,” said Dan Watkins, managing director of the Grand Traverse County Road Commission. “It’s been a strange winter, unfortunately. We had a hard freeze, then a long warm-up period in late January and early February. We usually don’t see that until March or April.”

Following a December with above-freezing temperatures and snowfall that never totaled more than a few inches, January seemed like winter was getting back on track: cold air and a string of winter storms blanketed the region, pushing seasonal snowfall totals from 23.5 inches in Houghton Lake to 60.5 inches in Petoskey as of Friday, according to the NWS.

But all those seasonal totals were below normal, including Traverse City’s 48 inches of snow versus 70.4.

The lackluster winter correlates to local tourism numbers dipping this year, compared to last year, according to Traverse City Tourism’s Executive Director Trevor Tkach.

Over the phone on Friday, Tkach agreed that he, too, would love to see some more snow.

“We live in a four-seasons state and, when one of those seasons doesn’t show up fully, that has an impact,” he said. “It’s been consistently inconsistent for quite a while now. We haven’t had consistently strong winters with consistently colder temperatures.”

While looking at data and analytics from last year, Tkach confirmed that Traverse City saw lower numbers of visitors so far this year compared to November 2022, December 2022, January 2023 and is on trend for being lower in February 2023 thus far.

Without mentioning specific numbers, Tkach confirmed that the cancellation of local events because of the mild weather has resulted in last-minute travel and lodging cancellations in the area.

“But even when we’ve had good snow that offered the opportunity to get outdoors and enjoy those outdoor winter activities, people are still reluctant to book, or they are still canceling because of the uncertainty that they’re experiencing in their own hometown,” Tkach said.

This has caused TC Tourism to get creative and think of new ways to advertise vacations in lower Northwest Michigan that don’t revolve around the promise of fresh powder days on the slopes, he added.

With Presidents’ Day and Valentine’s Day fast approaching, Tkach said they all are hopeful that there might be more snow and, with that, an uptick in winter sports-loving visitors.

It’s not the first bad winter Grand Traverse Area Snowmobile Club President Steve Haver remembers. He’s 55 and recalled how the past two seasons weren’t great, either. But this one stands out.

“We’re just not getting the volume of snow, and it just melts away,” he said.

That’s likely to hurt Haver’s efforts to recruit more members for the club and, in turn, more volunteers to work the trails, he said. Not only is he not out riding and meeting other snowmobilers, but he agreed people are less likely to pitch in if they think their efforts will be for little to nothing.

Even Upper Peninsula snow wasn’t spared, with the UP 200 sled dog race organizers saying “fur-get it.”

Handler went on a trip to the U.P. recently and saw, along with snowless trails, an empty restaurant in Christmas that would typically be packed with snowmobilers, he said. He and his friends stayed at a motel with one of 10 cabins occupied, and a snowmobile dealer had dozens of shiny new sleds for sale, plus a pile of snowmobiling gear on steep discount.

He agreed it must be battering the local economy wherever businesses cater to winter-weather enthusiasts.

It’s not just snow, either. Ice coverage on the Great Lakes has been trending downward since the early 1970s, when satellites gave the first year-round overview of lake surface conditions, said Bryan Mroczka, a physical scientist and meteorologist for the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Mild temperatures in December put ice formation well behind, with the entire Great Lakes currently at 5.8-percent coverage, compared to the usual 40 percent by February.

Ice seasons on the Great Lakes are shorter, too, by about 27 days, Mroczka said. That’s measured by watching ice cover grow and recede, starting when it reaches 5 percent in a season and ending the last time it drops below that level.

No ice can mean increased shore erosion and flooding, while having biological impacts on aquatic life that reproduces best under cover of the ice, Mroczka said. Not all impacts are bad — less ice means Great Lakes shippers can keep their boats in the water longer and, while ice fishing is out, anglers can take their boats out on the water when the weather permits.

Warmer, drier winters are typical during El Niño conditions, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s when warm water upwelling in the Pacific Ocean along the equator moves the polar jet stream. That snaking line of westerly winds in the lower atmosphere divides warmer air to the south from colder air to the north so, as it shifts, it can bring drastic weather changes.

Whether climate change can impact this phenomenon is an open question, according to NOAA.

Research led by the University of Innsbruck’s Paul Wilcox and published in “Geophysical Research Letters” looked at stalagmites from Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island as 3,500-year climate records. Scientists found that human-caused climate change could be the cause of stronger, more frequent El Niños.

The Great Lakes region seems particularly affected by the ongoing warming trend, seeing gradually warmer temperatures during winters that start increasingly later, Mroczka said.

“We’re definitely seeing a warming trend in the atmosphere over the Great Lakes — and that warming trend is more pronounced during winter,” he said. “It’s why we’re seeing some of these ice issues. For whatever reason it’s occurring, the data is there to support this warming trend.”

But don’t think that means winters over the Great Lakes will become a thing of the past, Mroczka said. That same data is very “noisy,” meaning there are plenty of winters where the lakes iced up plenty — 2015 and 2019, for example.

“We’re going to have some severe winters; we’re going to have some big snowstorms — but the frequency of those colder winters is decreasing,” he said.

Haver agreed the climate is changing, noting that it has for millennia. He believes that could turn around, but meanwhile it seems like there’s less snow every year.

Still, this winter isn’t over and, in the long run, Haver has no intention of giving up on snowmobiling.

“I’ve met too many people while I’m doing this work, and I’ve made good friends that I’m just going to stick it out,” he said.