You can't take one event and substitute it for an entire winter's worth of snow, which we didn't get.

When you look at the averages you find out that in general, we're a little wetter than normal statewide. But the downside of that is that the last 2 1/2 months have been quite dry, and that we're actually at one of the slowest starts to our snow accumulation season in the past 10 years.

The short story is that 2005 started out unusually wet ... so that at the end of February we had the wettest start to any year on record.

The snow-less winters makes them more vulnerable to predators. The lower elevations of their range where there is less snowfall are the areas where the numbers really dropped.

We have the best snow of any other resort around.

I guess that's good news unless you like snow and winter.