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Dan Pope Reporting After yesterday's big snow storm, there were a lot of happy skiers on the slopes. Today was a good day for skiers.
The new snow brought lots of smiles to skiers and plenty of dollar signs to Utah's resorts. I was surprised to find a large number of out-of-state skiers on the slopes today.
Tanice Richards, Needles, Calif.: "Well, yesterday we were up here, and it was snowing real hard, and it was hard to see, but today, it's gorgeous, with sun and all the fresh powder on the slopes, skiing is pretty easy now."
Ilya Bievrlietn, Amsterdam, Netherlands: "Well, you can see, it's great. It's wonderful, I love it, and I'm going to go to all the resorts, all the mountains.
Sara Linssen, San Diego: "It's really nice to be out here. I mean, a couple of years ago when there wasn't as much fresh snowfall and it was more icy and it was really hard to ski, but now it's really nice. It's all powdery."
That's a lot of fun. When the average snow is about 10 inches to one inch of water, every inch of water equates to a gallon.
How much water do we use for one serving of certain items?
- Apples......13 Gallons
- Milk.....65 Gallons
- Two Eggs......136 Gallons
- Typical Dinner.....2,897 Gallons
The average family uses 326,000 gallons of water per year. That's the equivalent of one acre-foot of water. Utah's reservoirs contain 7.5 million acre-feet of water. That is a value for consumers over a billion dollars a year.
I did some calculations, and I figured that about an inch of water is equal to $10 million in value. Yesterday's one to three inches of water is valued at around $10 million to $30 million. That is certainly very valuable to the state of Utah.
