powderfreak

Nice crack o’ noon powder turns. 4-5” refresh skied great.

Stake at season high after last nights refresh.

Half inch down in the valley were temps stayed 32-34F all night. Mountain at 3,000ft is at 4-5” now. Good pulse this morning brought 2” between 6-8am.

Everyone is going to need you to get on that plane. Sorry Jer.

GFS is a nice starting point, can always raise them later.

Weak system moving through tonight. I think hills get 2-4”.

Anything not on the map not getting a lot of traffic at all. All season it’s been so easy to find untracked. Many locals went to Sugarbush this year and the benefit is low hanging fruit being untracked.

45F today, fantastic day. Loving the longer daylight. Backyard snowpack is on its way down. Dog needs to enjoy rolling in it, who knows how long it lasts. Feels like mid-March out here.

2 on February 11th and 1 on February 9th. Very high frozen-lake traffic despite the record warm months. The arctic shot created a false sense of security.

We enjoy these backyard dog walks as it warms up. It has been an obscenely warm winter. The snowpack here in the valley/river bottom will go quick unless we can wedge in. Photo this evening to show the diminished pack.

All weekend long, so many woods lines remained fresh. Stowe saw heavy crowds on Saturday. It was a high-end day. Traffic was slow on arrival but not stopped like it was in recent years. The mountain never ran out of parking spots, just a lot of people arriving at the same exact time on a 2-lane road. Either way, the people are not skiing the woods lines immediately next to major groomed trails.

What a view/scene.

Another fun day out there. Lots of hikers heading to the Chin for backcountry (side-country) laps.

Hovering upper 30s to 40F this afternoon in the valley. Fantastic day on the mountain at 25-35F depending on elevation. Correlation to a great ski day if DAW is 45-50F.

Yeah that was a bold call by the Pope to use that graphic to show the West hasn't seen much and that it's mostly cold and dry. That's just not paying attention. Not going to slip that by skiers, ha. The SWE from Colorado, through all of Utah, Nevada, the Sierra, the SW, and up into parts of Wyoming to southern Oregon... all doing very well and having strong snowfall seasons. There are a lot of 175-200+ numbers in those counties (percent of normal snowpack). Only place drier than normal on average is the far northern tier... but even up there a lot of it is 85-110% SWE.

That seems hard to believe that out west hasn’t seen much outside the coast… given the widespread much above normal SWE in almost all mountain areas out there. Most of the ski areas out there are absolutely buried, some record snows. They’ve had a lot of QPF. Whats been the change from pre-winter?

Oh, thought it was spurred by yesterdays comment. Season pass holders usually don’t know real reasons but they know rumors, ha.

14F this morning, now up to 19F. Some potential for upper 30s later though. Should feel nice.

Might have been wind and not mechanical? We had our Quad running at like 600 feet a min instead of 1000 fpm due to strong wind at the summit terminal on Friday I think it was. Yesterday Gondola started on wind hold. But remember, slower than normal speeds are usually wind related over mechanical. Mechanical is usually closed lift, there isn’t a whole lot of mechanical reasons a lift would run slow over fast. There’s an evac motor that runs very slow but that’s a one-time thing to get people off. My guess would be on wind. Lift Ops turns the speeds down. You can basically lower the lift speed until it’s at the point of what the “slow” button does and then it goes on hold.

We’ve heard Will/ORH say it before, ha. Why root against it? To get another 38-degree rainstorm over a 32F paste job? Can see rooting against it if the options are 65F and sunny vs a sloppy 3”… but often rooting against snow just leads to a cold rain in a system.

Ha hopefully they are skiing in bikinis… that’s also a great time. Warm skiing is a helluva lot of fun, just turns into beach on snow if it’s 60F.

Right, no control over it so going wildly one way or another seems like an effort in futility (pun?). Whatever helps folks make peace with it though for sure. There will be a 150 page thread if even 3-6” shows up.

Lol another stage of the grief is going after the ski areas and snowmobilers . I picked up where you guys left Dryslot off. Its all fun and games. We’ll be skiing into May like we do every year I bet.

Yeah it’s just a melt and coping by each who melts at different times. I still think it’ll snow again so being over it doesn’t really do anything lol.

For each person it’s the time they started getting anxious about the lack of snow. It started a lot earlier for some than others.