powderfreak

Yeah for sure, get 1,000 vertical feet of sweet powder and then get 1,000 vertical feet of variable mush to get back to the lift.... ride it back to the top just for those thousand verts of sweet pow. Some last winter views today.

Ah weren’t they open yesterday? That guy was riding lifts. Yeah I hear ya, I saw some good reports though and it looked fun on video. But it’s the hardcore time of year, can see why most families stop.

At that elevation its not hard. Peak is mid-March through mid-April for snowpack above 3,000ft. The upper 1,000ft really start to separate from the lower elevations as mean temps stay 32F or lower to keep building snowpack… while down in lower elevations mean temps are above 32F with melting. This time of year you have the elevations maxing out on depth while there’s 0” down low. While in January it could be 24” down low and 50” up high. Now it’s 0” low and 61” up high.

I dunno man, the video I've seen from Wildcat seems to indicate fresh, snowy skiing. You can ride a lift to this stuff.

Wet snow falling down in the valley now. It's pounding again along the Spine. Mansfield Stake up 8" to a season high of 61" of depth. Upslope all day long. Fun weather day. Wind and snow combo today was just as good as some of the Winter Storm Warnings this winter, ha.

Mansfield Stake at it's highest of the season with that 8 inch gain in this cycle... it really starts to separate itself from the lower elevations this time of year. Climo is a bit different up there at the picnic tables.

From another report of mine: The Northern Greens came through again! It's no surprise to anyone by now, ha, but it snowed today. I definitely was not expecting a round of 1"/hr snowfall today with steady snow continuing pretty much all day. Best skiing was by far above 2,500ft, with wet sloppy new snow and slow spring soft serve below that. The 3,000ft snow plots saw 4" after 7am, with half a foot falling this weekend at that level on Mansfield's eastern slope. There was quite a gradient with even more snowfall found above that. To that end, the Mansfield Stake is now at it's highest depth of the season right now with an 8-inch gain this weekend! Once again I thought we were done with the "uppers" off the Quad but the new snow let MMSP reopen Upper Goat, Upper Liftline and Upper Starr... my 3pm run down Upper Starr might have been my best on that trail of the season as the wind kept buffing it out. A surprising amount of liquid equivalent fell this weekend and it would not surprise me if 0.75-1.00" of water was added to the snowpack up high. That will beef things up for the mild weather coming this week. The only downside of this snowfall is that we'll all want a thick spring wax the next few days to avoid getting ripped out of our boots. There could be some winter turns tomorrow morning still, but it will warm up quickly in the sunshine. The recent snowfall will turn to glue up high but for now, we revel in the classic windy, snowy Mansfield experience.

2” of slop at 1500ft here at the ski area. VTrans even ran a plow up Mountain Road. Light snow at 34F base and 26F up top.

It is absolutely dumping even to the base area 1500ft. 1”/hr snows rolling through. About 3” since 7am.

Ha, shocking the stereotypes are different than reality.

Damn. Sorry hear Tip. Keep your head up, as hard as it may be at times.

Snowing up high with accums mostly 3000ft or higher. Snow line 2000-2500 but just switched to flakes at 1500ft now leaving the base area.

Just busting your balls. Expected you to say you were going to a Sox game for nice weather. I hope every day is nice this time of year, ha.

Don’t they play hockey games inside?

It will be very elevation dependent, snow limited to the mid-slopes and higher, like >2500ft to 4000+ at the ski areas. But healthy signal for mid-level deformation followed by NW upslope flow for the NW Greens and Whites. Euro now on board with decent QPF signal.

12z GFS is interesting... it has a nice swath of what verbatim would be half a foot of paste rolling through above 2,500ft. Might get interesting in the Northern Greens...

I almost think it’s passed a bit. When I was in college at UVM all anyone wanted was a Tacoma. That or a Nissan X-Terra, lol. That was 2003-2007. I feel like I see less of those now. I also haven’t lived in Burlington for 12 years now.

That list surprised me on an aside, ha. Figured Subaru would be #1-5. Reading into it there's still a lot of farm and manual labor, construction, in the rest of the state etc that overwhelms the Subaru numbers around Burlington. And Subaru doesn't make a working truck.

Yeah, I do think even if it was cheap to pave and maintain paved roads... it might not matter... there's also like a sub-conscious (or maybe more overt sometimes) vibe of "don't bring the suburbs here" by paving everything. People moving up to the North Country and start demanding roads that have been dirt for centuries should be paved is a good way to ostracize oneself, ha. Sprinkle in that humans love to resist change in anyway at all and roads stay dirt. On an aside too... looks like both states have a pretty similar list of most popular vehicles. Trucks in both NH and VT by far the most popular despite the stereotypes, ha. Looks like it goes Ford, Chevy, Toyota for both states. Most Registered Vehicles in Vermont 1) Ford F Series 2) Chevy Silverado 3) Toyota Tacoma 4) GMC Sierra 5) Subaru Forester Top registered vehicles in New Hampshire 1. Ford F-Series 2. Chevrolet Silverado 3. Toyota RAV4 4. Ram 1500/2500/3500 5. Honda CR-V

Big ice last night up in that 850-925mb cold pocket. From a colleague who's about to start banging ice off the lift.

Do you repave them annually though when the frost heaves buckle them? We always discuss it on our small road but grading it a couple times a year is so much cheaper than having to pave it and then fix it all the time. It always seems to be a cost discussion around these parts as it's very easy and cheap to fix a dirt/gravel road but when a paved road gets in unacceptable shape its very expensive. Limited infrastructure budgets probably play a much greater role than environmental reasons. There's a frost heave on RT 108 leading away from the ski resort here that's like a mini- asphalt halfpipe where everyone local knows to slow down to like 30 mph in a 50 mph zone. Just formed the past couple months, who knows when the state will deal with it. I'm sure some of the bad mud roads if paved would be a disaster in short order and then rarely get fixed... so you're left with this unacceptable paved road year round instead of a couple weeks of mud then grading.

Lift Maintenance found 1/2-1” of clear ice on the FourRunner Quad above 3000ft here. Sounds real rugged. Going to open with the Triple that stayed below the ice line.

This is one of the weirdest stories I’ve heard. Driver became stuck in mud in Middlesex, VT… and I have no idea how it gets to this: Mud season nightmare: A VPR host was stranded for 7 hours on a rural road. She barely survived. Nearly three weeks after Linda Radtke’s mud season disaster, she was still finding mud in her ears. She hung inverted out the driver’s side window. She was freezing, unconscious, her mouth in the mud. When Matthew Collins, a driver for The Auto Clinic, arrived on the scene, he could not initially make sense of what he saw. Something was hanging out of the car window. It was Radtke. She was wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag. She had one leg stuck through the driver’s side window of her car, lodged beneath the steering wheel. Her face, buried in the mud, was obscured. “You could hear gurgling,” Collins said. “She had a very, very faint, shallow heartbeat, just barely breathing. Her airways and all that, her nose, everything was full of mud.” https://vtdigger.org/2022/04/07/mud-season-nightmare-a-vpr-host-was-stranded-for-seven-hours-on-a-rural-road-she-barely-survived/

Pingers here too. 36F. Mansfield sitting 29F.

From 65F yesterday and perfect spring weather to a very cold sleety rain today. A full 180 degree switch from what’s the nicest weather you can think of to what’s the most miserable.