powderfreak

It wants to snow. Another little wave moving through this evening. Persistent -SN.

What a run its been. The rainless streak is about to end for the mountains, and this one could be a solid soaker. It won't be out of the ordinary, IMO, for a cutter this time of year... but its felt like a good month since we've had a healthy cutter. Two straight weeks to start December at -10.5F departure and plentiful snow, following a cool and wet November that featured plenty of higher elevation snows. Sucks, but it wasn't going to be snowless and warm out west all season... same with it wasn't going to be cold, deep powder all season here. Once it starts to snow in the Sierra and Rockies, it will signal a change. The surface conditions are going to change in New England, but the snowpack should still be solidly above normal.

This is the content I sign on to see. Nice, wintry scene. Classic New England scene. That’s legit December.

He’s established and respected. Not some nobody looking for web clicks. He has to believe it on some level. 12/9 with Light Snow. A nice dusting over the past hour. Visibilities staying high though at 3sm.

This is the internet in a nutshell with all topics. Everything is wrong all the time crowd vs everything is great all the time crowd. Most of us fall on a spectrum of that but there are clear tendencies.

If humans make every decision based on the dumbest people of the population, we’d get no where.

Mansfield stake goes over 5 feet and beats the previous earliest 60”+ depth by two weeks. Skiing is all-time, just like the depths.

63” Stake Depth on December 12th is absolutely insane. There’s more snow right now than the maximum depth of a non-trivial amount of winters.

4" more today. 19" measured since Wednesday AM. It skis like 30" though, ha.

It’s still snowing. Unbelievable stuff out there on the mountain. Just deep powder everywhere. Today’s stake reading should put this year back in the all-time #1 position for this time of year since 1954. And it could be by like a half foot too.

It's not accumulating very fast, but there's some steady gusty small flake (arctic sand) falling. It covers things up quickly but doesn't stack very well. Cold shallow moisture continues to stream into the region on NW flow. Nocturnal inversion is trying to squeeze out all remaining moisture from an arctic airmass.

December 11th and we have already measured roughly 33% of the seasonal snowfall at the Mt Mansfield plots. I know I harp on this, but I think the measured part is important when comparing years. If it’s not measured, but eyeballed, guessed, estimated… it’s hard to compare year to year. It becomes more vibe based, than data based. Both methods can tell a story, but this season being at 30+% of annual measured snow (in a controlled manner) is incredible to me… as someone who’s personally been involved in the process for almost 20 years now. This isn’t a marketing ploy. The various data points support it. Last year at this time the FourRunner Quad had been running for exactly one week. This year it’s been 3+ weeks of deep, skier supporting natural snowpack.

It truly is around a once a generation start based on the 70+ years of Mansfield stake data. It’s December 11th. It feels and looks like February.

Just absolutely rugged out. 9F, gusty winds, arctic fine flake snow adding 2-3” more today, blowing snow, sub-zero wind chills.

Some might call it a candidate?