powderfreak

Oh yeah absolutely on vacation weeks. People have been looking forward to it for months in many cases, they are going skiing whether it’s tropical downpours or -50F wind chills. They have a week of lodging, tickets, etc it’s vacation… they going. To be honest, Christmas Week sees it almost every single year of crap weather then hard arctic freeze . Presidents Week has been more lucky. I’m sure beach community folks think the same when my family rents at the beach and goes even if it’s cool, cloudy, showery… I traveled to the ocean I’m sitting on the beach and swimming dammit!

Its hard to tell with the wind but I’d bet it’s 2-3” up high and 1-2” down low. There’s some snow in the lot but it’s all blown around. Has the look of 1-2” with wind here. And I don’t mean to say it’s going to be good skiing, just that trail count to me isn’t a huge barometer… as there could be 10 feet on the ground at the stake and it rains and flash freezes, and the same exact trails would be open as this weekend (anything a groomer can hit). Once that thick ice layer is there, the only way to fix it is mechanically or with a lot of fresh snow.

See I disagree that it’s rare. Every year has its thaws and freezes… they’ll groom even natural snow trails. It’s just a groomed vs ungroomed trail scenario. They’ve got 2-3 winches working both shifts tonight I think. Hayride, Liftline, etc. You fall you’ll go for a long ride though. If you fall on an beginner trail that’s not groomed you might be in for an uncontrollable fall . But we have times after thaw-freeze where it’ll be a day of one route down off of each lift. The snow is still there, just need to groom it. I’m not saying it’ll be good but it’ll be open, ha.

No we'll be at like 65-70 tomorrow. Just didn't have enough time to groom with the late freeze. We went into today with the plan that from 5am to 10am we could groom 30 trails to be skiable. With two full shifts they should be able to get to all the snowmaking trails and some natural trails. We've had one day acute trail reductions most winters after a thaw... normally they can groom 60-70 in a night and it's hard to be much below that for any period of time.

We were only at like 30 trails or lower today out of 120 for that exact reason. It’s a very common practice. You never groom in the rain as a rule of thumb. Yesterday I was in a meeting about what to do about today and there’s actually a lot of thought that goes into it. I figured it looked like snowcats could get on the hill by 5am or so. We took a 6 acre per hour grooming rate per operator and wanted to get at least 150 acres open of beginner/intermediate terrain. Then decided yesterday morning to delay opening until 10am today… 5 operators, 5 hours, at 6 acres/hr gets that 150 acres. Operations teams do think about this stuff quite a bit… not just throwing darts randomly haha.

Also anyone know what this is? Secondary FROPA that line that swung through very fast on radar? Almost like a gust front?

Nice surface outside of Mountain Ops this morning looking up towards the bottom of Nosedive/Sepps Run....

They were ok when I came up. Lots of standing water though that hadn't frozen yet. I hear its terrible now. I mean it is absolutely plummeting temperatures. It was 40s like two hours ago. Now 16.7F at the office and sustained winds of 30mph. Flash freeze at it's finest. The "forecast" icon is hilarious, lightning, snowflake, raindrop.

This is some of the worst weather conditions I've seen in a long time. Just high winds, sleet and freezing rain going sideways. My car was completely encased in ice after driving up to the office. It's 23F up here and 13F at the summit now.... it was in the low 40s like 90 minutes ago. Everything flash freezing as we speak and ice pellets just slamming into the windows.

It is pouring sleet and freezing rain sideways in strong winds. This is about as nasty a weather condition as it gets up here this morning. All water is in the process of turning into a skating rink. Temps just plummeted... 40s to 20F style.

It is raining with authority here just to the north of the 89 symbol in the center of the radar. Not ideal right before the busy President's Day week/end. Radar beam is over-shooting it in E.VT.

Yeah any warm sector event is a cutter. We pour rain. It's been mid-40s at both home and work since I woke up at 4:30am and got to work at 5am (yes, it's only 30 minutes from the time my alarm goes off, to the time I'm logging on at the office up the road, ha). There's going to be a lot of frozen water after the flash freeze in the early AM hours after midnight. I think the skiing is wrecked on the whole until it snows again. Creek beds blown out, harder to move laterally on skis in the woods. Trail undersurface will be extremely firm, if not outright ice. We live for adversity though, it is New England.

559" for MWN's windy under-catch gauge is crazy, ha.

They seem a lot more common all the sudden now that you moved north... hmmm.

And flatter terrain so it's not getting scraped off... need mellow terrain, tons of grooming, and light crowds right now. We are delaying opening until 10am tomorrow. I just updated Stowe.com/Snow with our plans for the morning. No sugarcoating there, ha.

The number of 1" snowfalls in the mountain snow tally is pretty crazy. Some year's those are always 3-5"... and you have three of them in 7-day stretches. We keep ending up with like 2-3" totals "for the past 7 days" a lot this winter.

Wind is cranking up here at the ski area. Showing 47F at 1500ft and very well mixed.

I took one run and did the snow/water survey after that and then went home, haha. I'm so over firm and fast conditions this time of year. In November or December, sure but not week long stretches of it in mid-February. I'll find something else to do. No patience for it in February/March/April. May not ski for a good solid week after this next one unless it snows a little . To illustrate how solid the ungroomed snow is, this guy snapped his ski in half on a mogul. It's a Stockli Stormrider! Those things are solid skis but no match for frozen moguls right now.

Holy crap. MVL ASOS is torching. Yesterday at 4am it was -8F. Today it’s 48F. Talk about a 24 hour delta.

Red Sox fans before the 2004 ALCS…

Yeah I honestly haven’t looked into melted water averages at first order sites but anecdotally I’d say it’s dry. I read on Sugarbush’s blog that they’ve actually been having water supply issues at Lincoln Peak over the last month due to cold/dry January. Rivers are frozen solid and low water flow…that’ll change here soon, ha. You are right, the events we are missing this winter aren’t the big ones but the SWFE 0.50-0.75” of snow to ice… the moderate ones that sometimes make up the seasonal water average. It’s been high precip events or low-to-nothing water starving “events.” Another several inches of QPF (or even 4-8” in the mtns) to get to normal would really have changed the “active-ness” of the winter tenor.

Lol that's awesome. I think I'm mid-50s here with crude accounting and have gotten there in a much less fun way than you guys. Lots of 40-65" amounts across VT except the normal snow belts in the 70s and 80s. Need to get up above 2,500ft in the northern Greens to get 100"+ so far and those are areas that average 250"+. What is interesting to me is how dry it has seemed too. The snowpack is low for this time of year but the water amounts are also very low. I ran some snow cores today for NOAA as one of their Mets reached out to see if I could get them some numbers for Hydro prior to the rain event. 3,000ft had only 38-42" depth but the shocker was really only 8.0-11.0" water. I've seen that plot have 20"+ of water in mid-February before and have seen 25-30" of water in April... so much so that this scale goes all the way around the dial and back into the single digits, lol. If I had to wager a guess, normally it's 16-20" at this time over the past decade or so. We've missed a lot of the frequent smaller precip events it seems... the 0.25-0.50" water events or Advisory level snows. The only reason the mountain snowpack is this high is because that last snow event fell into the 1.50-2.00" water amount at this elevation. This is the highest reading of 5 from the High Road Snow Plot. Down at 1,600ft there was 22-24" of snowpack and ~6-7.5" water from various readings. Normal I'd wager is around 10" of SWE. Been an interesting winter with few events it seems... that shakes out to lower than normal water levels in the mountains and lower snowpack. For the places that have lower average annual snowfall, if you can hit a couple of good events out of the few that we've had as a region, you're in good shape (ie. coastal DE/NJ/LI up through Ginxy and SE MA).

Oh yeah, they were fully backcountry skiing. There are a lot of folks who do that in NNE.

It’s like 30% water at 1600ft and say 20-25% water at 3,000ft. There’s some room there but once it hits 40-50% water it is really “ripe” and melts fast as it can’t absorb H2O beyond that.

Ran some snow cores for NOAA ahead of the warmth. Low snowpack and low water equivalent. I’ve seen 20-24” of water in mid-Feb at 3000ft before. HIGH ROAD 3,015FT 38-42” and 8.0-11.0” SWE (9.0” MOST COMMON) BASE AREA (1,600FT) 22-24” and 6.5-7.5” SWE