powderfreak

A ton of people talk about that. How their camera or iPhone doesn’t do the scene justice of what they are seeing. A lot of people get frustrated by it. Like “this tree is literally glowing red in front of me but then I take a shot with the phone and it looks so bland.”

What gets me on these days is the mean daily temperature will be lower in the valleys because the night is so cold. So even if the afternoon is 3-5F warmer, the night being 15F colder averages out to a colder diurnal mean.

Yeah I should've clarified too. People around here have always rented out their places for a couple/few weeks a year to cover their bills, taxes, etc. That totally makes sense. What I see is more on the Industrial level scale of renting. Our townhomes have people who own multiple units. They are in it solely for renting and their units are empty a few weeks a year instead of the other way around. Then by owning multiple units they control the HOA, etc. Next thing they are trying to get folks to pay for a heated pool because they control more HOA votes and heated pool goes better on their listings and charging more money. Many decisions made are not for the better quality of living necessarily but what works better on a VRBO listing. That's my personal druthers, ha ha. There are also corporations buying up property, homes, condos, townhomes, etc around here for rentals... so you know there will never be an actual owner living there at any point in time. I get cold calls personally from companies looking to buy my place, ha. To me the balance might be limiting the number of weeks you can rent a property? Something that tries to make sure it is actually someone's second home/vacation place and not owned solely to be a stand alone mini-hotel operation? I do like the positives you pointed out though. Its good to remind myself of that sometimes. We could live in the country with nothing around us but chose to live in Stowe because we also like seeing some humans, eating out, bars, restaurants, breweries, music, festivals, etc. That wide variety of food, drinks, breweries, etc that is often on par with small cities is all because the town is popular. Property values too... ours has tripled since buying in 2012. Not a bad investment. And 95% of the days in a calendar year are perfectly fine, normal days. So much of this rabble rousing is for under 5% of days annually. @bwt3650 you think very much like me, ha. I've always used the football stadium or concert analogy too! No matter what happens, if you go to say Foxboro on a Sunday for a Pats game. You are waiting in traffic. There's no way around it. You cannot have that volume of people arrive and leave at similar times and not wait. There may be capacity at the end of the road (the stadium) but the road itself will bottleneck hard. Even rush hour into or out of a city. The Mountain Road here is like I-93 into Boston but on a much smaller scale obviously. The office buildings all those people go to is like the chairlift capacity (it's there, it can handle it) but getting to that office building or chairlift is all via the same roads and thus, bumper to bumper traffic. Even during AIG days there were traffic problems. Maybe people want to pay $2200 and have traffic a half dozen days vs. paying much less and having it a dozen days instead? And in the grand scheme of things.... a 155 day operating season, trying to do some monster infrastructure project for what is maybe 8% of winter days, and like 2-3% of days out of an entire year... seems like a hard sell. No one is building a 3rd lane on RT 108 for such a low percentage of days out of the calendar once you really boil it down.

Speaking of inversions, it was impressively tight around here. The fake cold crowd will love this. Low of 31F at a few local PWS along the valley floor, as well as the MVL ASOS, with heavy frost in the 700-800ft elevation band. 750ft freezing, but by even 850-900ft temps were mid-30s. By 1200ft it was mid-40s. At 1,500ft temps hung near 50F all night. Downright balmy this morning at the ski area while everything was iced in town. Extremely tight inversion. First image is larger view this morning (mins were 1-2F colder than this snapshot in the valley). Second image is my local area near the river and Stowe CC where the cold pools. 32F at the bottom of the hill 750ft and 46F at the top of the hill at 1200ft.

Looks like it went off-line at 3:05pm at 81F and came back online at 4:10pm at 63F. Now at 37F it’s in line with all the local radiating PWS spots showing 36-39F. Good to see BTV must’ve caught it and sent someone out late afternoon?

Yeah leaf drop has been strong. Mountain is definitely past now. Town is probably backside of peak.

Ha yeah it’s funny now because the cell phone apps around here are pulling MVL’s temp… my wife just texted “I’m no weather guru but it’s not 82 outside.”

Yeah BTV is 57F. No way it’s in the 70s. PWS aren’t even close. Upper 50s mostly. Disregard .

Wait, that can’t be right. MVL now 79F? The ASOS on the fritz? 79/36? METAR KMVL 111635Z AUTO 18005KT 10SM CLR 26/02 A3025

What a day. 28F and freezing fog this morning... up to 73F at 12:15pm at MVL! Already a 45 degree delta on the day at noon. It was still below freezing at 8:15am and now 4 hours later it's in the 70s.

AirBnB and VRBO have definitely changed this area. The hotels used to be great capacity limiters... once the hotels were sold out, you couldn't stay here. That capped the town's available beds for visitors at a very set number. The hotels like Topnotch, Stoweflake, Trapps, etc sell out and you are out of luck. Now there's over 1,000 private residences for rental on AirBnB and VRBO, most of them designed to pack people in too. You could realistically add another 5,000 people to town on a weekend just in the short term rental market. If you double the amount of beds in a town that visitors can sleep in (without building a single hotel), this is what happens. The single family home behind me rents out to 3 families at a time. Bunkbeds, pull out couches, etc. It's designed to cram people in. The guy charges $900 a night for it. If he rents that 100 days out of 365 in a year, that's $90,000 in revenue he now makes off his second home and he visits the same amount of time as he used to before renting it. But he also doesn't understand why there's so many people around town all the time. The irony. Ski towns used to complain about all the second homes sitting empty most of the year... well, they found a way to fill them with as many humans as possible all year round. I'm not one to tell someone what they can and can't do with their property, but it's an interesting dilemma in town right now. You can see why some places restrict short term rentals.

Ha the Family of 4 gets in for free and doesn't need a pass. To be honest the lots only truly fill up maybe 3-4 days a season. The road is the issue. And since COVID the people per car metrics nationwide are way down, so there's actually now more cars to get to the same level of actual skiers than in the past. If it used to be 2.5 per car and now is 1.3, that's a big difference (just as an example). Traffic has gotten worse without seeing an increase in the actual number of skiers. All the cars and 1 person in each one. The mountain also has the lift capacity that lines are never too bad and you can always find lifts like the Lookout Double and Sensation Quad to ride. The lift capacity far outweighs the two lane road capacity. Same thing in like the Cottonwood Canyons. But in Stowe it's not just winter. This past weekend was worse than anything in the winter. Took me 1.5 hours to get to the mountain and 45 minutes to get home. This is with no snow on the roads. It took some people two hours to get to Exit 10 at Waterbury. The interstate was backed up a couple miles on the shoulder of people trying to just get off Exit 10. This was a shot from a friend in the Notch on Saturday. There are just a LOT of people around on the weekends all year round. Ski area open or not. Summer has had more traffic than ever, it's just in different places. Even dirt roads had huge backups. It's not just a winter ski area problem. This area is extremely popular.

One more from Saturday's first snowfall.

28F with very dense fog this morning. There was actually some rime forming on evergreen boughs in the freezing fog.

29F at closest PWS… 30F MVL… 33F at 1500ft and 35F at 1800ft. Summit is 32F.

The leftovers made it through till Sunday… even made it through Sunday night at the Cliff House up in the clouds. Shows how long 1.5” of snow can linger at like low-mid 30s temps this time of year. Sun angle continues to lower quickly. The upper slopes that are shadowed the most tend to hold the snow.

Got all the way to 53F here with sunshine all afternoon.

Yeah one of our lines goes into the basement to get across and the other is one single vertical outside on the side wall above the condenser. They’ve got it down now that you don’t have tubes wrapping around 3 sides of your home.

I will say the new heat pump works great here for very efficient heating on electric now. And locked in $2.50/gallon propane for the winter (last winter I paid $4). Going to be a much cheaper winter at least monthly bills, but also factor in the thousands for the A/C, Heat mini split, haha.

Looks like 2-3 great mild, sunny days before that FROPA late week. Even up here rebounding well into the 60s to low 70s. Super bi-polar weather this time of year.

Some folks saying they saw flurries or something frozen this morning in the valley around here. I wasn’t up yet. MVL ASOS reported “unknown precipitation” at 36F so it was very close. METAR KMVL 101050Z AUTO 00000KT 10SM UP BKN004 OVC033 02/01 A3014 RMK P0001

That’s a sick wildlife shot!

We had a brief period of snow on the upper mountain this morning from WAA. Still snow covered around the top of the Gondola at 32F. Definitely could be snow in the Whites.

Nice, a lot of folks ending their growing season.

Do you ever get frosts? Like sure you get below freezing, but do you wake up to hard white frozen grass? Frosts aren’t really a hill top thing…that condensing, temp meets dew point at 100% RH is not something the mid-slopes up here see at night very often at any time of year. The atmosphere is mixed and can’t stay calm long enough to condense. The whole idea of a frost advisory is to protect growing vegetation… and historically agriculture is more of a valley thing where frosts happen. To be honest, as weird as it is there’s probably an elevation around my area at like 1700ft that’s the absolute last place to see 32F or lower temperatures. It freezes on the upper mountain in CAA, and then at night it’ll freeze from 1500ft and down. But there’s absolutely a mid-slope zone that’s the last place to hit 32F on the year. That’s probably like your spot. Isn’t high enough to get into the sub-freezing zone aloft during early season cold shots, and also won’t radiate during those early season troughs.