Grand Targhee hosts final day of ski season Easter Sunday

While some were out hunting for Easter eggs Sunday, others were treasuring their final runs of the season at Grand Targhee Ski Resort.

Sunday, Targhee officially held its last day of the season, one of two bonus days the resort offered skiers and snowboarders this weekend.

Large crowds came out on Easter, and many were just there to watch.

“We spun Dreamcatcher for the Crazy Horse Hill Climb,” director of marketing Jennie White said. “So some of the best seats in the house were from the lift, to get all the action from the snowmobile hill climb.”

The two-day event features hundreds of riders in the final event of the hill climb season.

“They come in, they take over the mountain, and we spent all week building the course for them and it’s from the bottom of the mountain to the top of big thunder,” White said.

The event caps off a great season that saw the mountain get nearly 500 inches of snow, 136 of those in February alone. But once the snowmobiles are off the slopes and the patrons have all gone home, it’s time to prepare for the next season.

“So after we close today, we actually start preparing for summer. We start digging out some of the trails, the bike trails, we let some of the snowmelt, but our lift maintenance crews come in, they do all the maintenance on all the lifts,” White explained.

Ski patrol will then bring things in off the mountain, mechanics will prepare the snowcats for storage and then the mountain basically shuts down until biking season begins.

But until then, it’s a waiting game to see much snow melts.

“We’ll see what spring brings, you know, every year is a little bit different. We could get another eight feet of snow, maybe, it’s the Tetons,” White joked.

“It has been a long winter, it’s always hard to see winter go but yeah, I’m ready to get my mountain bike out and hit the trails.”

The resort will reopen for the start of mountain bike season on June 16.