powderfreak

MWN is absolutely glowing on the horizon right now! Western sun behind me on Stowe and there’s just this glowing white ridge off in the distance.

First time seeing ice on the ground this evening. About 3,000ft, walking by had to do a double take... like, “that’s frozen water, at 4pm?” Warm ground laughing. Oh and a dog sat next to it.

It is so nice out, full bluebird. Not many of these left, taking the opportunity to bounce out of work early, grab the dog and go for a hike. 55/25 in the valley right now.

Yeah aesthetically I still love the Great 48 concept, but functionally for Mountain Ops and how the mountain is skied/opened/closed/groomed/snowmaking it makes sense to break it up into segments instead of 2,000+ vertical feet, 1-2 mile long trails with a lot of variability that ski like different segments anyway (I will say it's rare to ski a trail fully from top-to-bottom too, it's more hopping from segment to segment). Grooming often can be only certain parts of trails too, so you get a bunch of partially groomed runs. Snowmaking is easier to communicate even to staff when its broken up into segments too. But the "Stowe Great 48" is now classic ski memorabilia... maps, posters, t-shirts, etc. I love that stuff.

Love when the only remaining foliage on the trees is generally orange at this point, orange mixed with bare trees... and the Satellite view is definitely also orange. I would say that orange glow areas are in the past peak category while nearby neighboring the orange zone is likely best colors right now?

Severe wind haven! I remember that Mt Tom event, isn't there a road that runs through there that got smoked? Or is this photo from that road, ha.

For sure probably in your area more, you guys were already clear in the afternoon right? The bust up here was the trapped moisture stratus and wind, that was still prevalent after sundown... NWS went conservative with the cloud cover and wind up here in the mountains. We still had OVC in the OBS until midnight when it went CLR afterward... I think it was just a cloud cover and wind issue, hedging conservative in the mountains with trapped upslope flow moisture. It went clear/calm around midnight and plummeted.

Interesting correlation there to very cold mins early season then... seeing as ‘64 and ‘65 also had 5 days at CON with mins in the 20s so far. Dry air and ground limiting frost/fog and allowing temps to sneak into the 20s with more frequency? There’s definitely something there, it makes sense.

What were the dry years in the 1960s?

We need to create a Wikipedia page for that scientific name.

Yeah I’ve been enjoying any mild/warm afternoon possible. Hoping to have another good weekend of hiking. lol at MWN, a low of 12F with a wind chill of -16F.

That’s wild. It looks like November outside.

What a bust. Forecast was for a low of 35F... actual 25F. Frozen solid outside. Currently 28F.

The worst radar coverage is by far eastern VT. The Spine close to BTV means we need to use higher scans, but if 2.4 degree is the first to clear the Spine, that angle is so steep that by the time it’s in eastern VT or the northeast kingdom, it’s at 12-15000 feet up. Like I-91 corridor, the radar is hitting 15,000ft up in the air, which isn’t going to give you much help in figuring out the surface. In fact, at 15000ft in eastern VT, many times all the precipitation is occurring well below that, even synoptic precipitation. So you never even see the precip unless it’s summer convection punching high in the air. I think that’s why @alex mentioned the lack of echoes in eastern VT... the beam keeps rising as the precip moves eastward, and eventually the beam is just going above the precipitation, because the Green Mtn Spine necessitates a steep initial scan angle.

Regarding the radar, I was actually surprised how low the radar beam can sample in Phin’s area for being so far away from the radar site. Here just east of Mansfield, my place is only 21 miles from the radar site in BTV and the ski area shows up at 17 miles away. However due to the 4,000ft terrain, the lowest usable beam is the 2.4 degree scan... and RadarScope says that’s generally sampling the sky between 5-6,000ft here. I noticed without any big terrain locally near the GYX radar site, that you can get great coverage with the 0.5 degree scan (that one is completely useless out of BTV though). So despite Phin’s area being a long 62 miles away from the radar site, it’s still sampling that same 5-6000ft level around him. That blew my mind for some reason... that being so far away from the radar, that area of NNH is getting sampled at a similar height to the first usable scan height in our area, three times closer to the radar site. But for sure there’s still plenty of low level precipitation generating... or heavier that radar shows. I just found it interesting in terms of beam heights how similar our areas are despite the different distance from the radar sites. Alex’s area looks to get blocked the most, as MWN is almost on a direct line between him and GYX.

It’s so widely used that it makes sense to try and get some tax dollars out of it. Just to clarify (I know what you meant though), recreational marijuana has been legal since 2018... but this new bill is to permit recreational sales (starting in 2022).

Just pretend to be leaf peeping. They barely know what state they are in, and it seems they all just got their drivers licenses before coming, not a COVID test . Three-way stop signs are very tricky to navigate.

Probably the ones standing are the tough ones? Around here it’s the white pines that come down in big numbers lately. One fell across Mountain Road last night up here taking power lines with it. Big sucker they were still cutting up this morning.

Ha nice, that’s exactly what I saw earlier. Flakes lasted about a minute as the ridge line took that hazy white look that’s a tell-tale of snow/virga.... finally hit the surface and was over in a minute lol. But it wasn’t rain, puts a little hop in your step. Next check mark is like legit under 5 mile vis snow showers.

Ha, none taken. I actually did that, literally. Stowe used to have the “Great 48” and it was only 48 trails, top-to-bottom. One of the very first tasks I had when I started in 2008 was to change the trail map to more accurately represent the mountain in terms of open terrain, and increase our trail count for marketing (Bolton Valley had like 60 trails I think? Stowe was the smallest mountain in Vermont per trail count with only 48, lol). Aside from marketing, a big issue was if you ski here, you’d know we really had “48 partially open trails.” There'd be times when literally almost every trail was “partially open” which confused the hell out of people...because only in mid-season snowpack with good conditions would many of the trails be fully open top-to-bottom. Now Ski Patrol had them internally sort of hacked up into different trails anyway in their lingo, because you have to when describing stuff over the radio (like they already named things upper/lower etc). An injured skier would call and the nearest trail sign says Lord and I have a broken leg. Well that’s a couple miles and 2,000 vertical feet of possibilities. Now they say the nearest sign says “Lower Lord” so patrol can quickly know where they are. So I worked with the Patrol director and others to break up the trails into how the mountain skied, what our normal closures are, access points to trails, etc. So now Starr and Lower Starr can be marked on the report as open, and Upper Starr (steep rocky headwall) can be marked as closed. I do think that’s better for communicating rather than saying “Starr is partially open.” Sometimes only Lower Starr is open from Shiftrs Shot, too. So you’d see Starr is partially open before 2008 on the report but have no idea what “part” was actually open. Marketing got a great trail count boost and it’s much more functional for figuring out what’s actually open and serves as easier to communicate with ski patrol and the public.

Mangled flurries at 1500ft now. Really dry air, evap cooling is doing it’s thing to get flurries down this low. Radar showing some showers popping up now along the Spine. Heard Bolton Valley at 2100ft had some -SN move through, too. Just enough moisture to squeeze out some light flurries as it evaporates and dries up on it's way down.

Driveway to the family’s place in Woodstock, CT.

Some light rime icing up high this morning.... 29F with a wind chill of 15F at the top of the Gondola.

We soggy ground.

I can’t believe the hail off the metal roof at the Gondola is still here this morning, 14 hours later. There’s several piles of it around the building lol.