Two years ago, Boreal opened Woodward Tahoe, a 32,000-square-foot indoor action-sports gym, with year-round use for everyone from Olympic athletes to cheerleading squads. Ski areas everywhere are adding nonsnow activities, like mountain-bike parks and zip-line courses, especially since 2011, when federal legislation allowed expanded uses for ski areas on government land.

“We have to get our heads out of the snow,” Boreal’s general manager, Amy Ohran, said. “A lot of discussions are about seasonal diversity, and expanding revenues in areas that are not dependent on snow. Our hearts are in skiing and snowboarding, and we want to see that succeed. But we have to cast a bigger net.”

Still, snow is the thing. Sierra-at-Tahoe relies mostly on snow from the sky. And when it falls, the resort has a plan to make the most of it.

“Every flake counts,” Mr. Rice, the general manager, said.

It will plow the parking lot into stripes, use snowblowers to load the snow into trucks, and carry it onto the mountain. It will erect fences on its slopes, even park trucks in strategic places, to capture the blowing snow in piles to be redistributed. The trails, for now, look like steep golf fairways, groomed of the clutter of rocks and logs, the grass cut short by mowers.

When Sierra-at-Tahoe built a sprawling stone deck off its base lodge last year, it considered heating it, to avoid the hassle of snow removal. Instead, the deck is a 30,000-square-foot capturing device for snow to be used on the slopes.

Last year, employees formed a bucket brigade to move snow from the protected shade of the forest onto the slopes for skiers.

“It’s not like it matters if I have six feet,” Mr. Rice said. “That would be nice. But it’s what the top six inches is like. If it’s soft and white, that’s what people want.”