J.Spin

Saturday was expected to be fairly chilly, with temperatures topping out in the teens F, and without any fresh snow in a couple of days, backcountry touring seemed to be the call. I was looking for something new to explore, so I planned a tour in the southwest corner of Bolton’s Nordic & Backcountry Network. My anticipated route was from the Catamount Trail parking lot on the Bolton Valley Access Road at ~1,200’, head up through the expansive beaver pond meadows in the Mt. Mansfield State Forest, and top out around the Buchanan Shelter at 2,150’ below the Long Trail. On my ascent I was on the lookout for potential descent options, exploring trails on the network such as Moose-ski. The terrain was nice, but generally rolling, so while there were some nice descents, it would be challenging once my climbing skins were removed. The views from that area across the beaver ponds did provide some great views back toward the alpine trails and the Village area. The best powder skiing terrain on the tour was definitely on the slopes below the Buchanan Shelter, with some nice areas of open forest. The only sign of skiing in that area was an old ski track from someone that must have been from at least a couple of storms ago. I suspect traffic is generally light in this area because it requires an approach that’s close to two miles, vs. much quicker access in many other spots on the network. Even without new snow in a couple of days, the snow preservation has been so good, that the quality of the powder is simply spectacular. The snowpack I found was generally in the two- to three-foot range, but there’s such good density in the bottom layers that anything of concern is well covered. The powder out there yesterday was so good that I told my wife and the two of us headed back out to the area for another tour today. The boys were both at work covering shifts for friends, so the fact that it just ended up being the two of us was sort of neat in the context of Valentine’s Day. A few shots from the weekend’s ski touring:

There were no major updates to BTV’s maps this morning – the projected accumulations map was similar to what they had out earlier, and on the alerts map, there had just been an expansion of additional Winter Storm Watches. A text alert this afternoon indicated that we’ve been updated to a Winter Storm Warning here in Washington County, and the alerts map shows that Winter Storm Warnings have been put in place for much of Northern Vermont and Northern New York at this point. The projected accumulations map has much of the northern half of Vermont in the 8-12” range, with a couple spots in the 12-18” shading. Our point forecast here suggests accumulations in the 8-16” range through Tuesday, and I’m seeing 10-18” for the Mansfield point forecast, which is where they do have that area of darker shading.

I’ve seen radar echoes pushing into the area for a while, but nothing beyond that as the precipitation has presumably been getting eaten up by dry air. I just took a look outside and I see that there are actually a few flakes falling now though.

I love the wintry look of icicles as well, although I have to say that I’m glad that we don’t have to deal with them here. We know not to outwardly enjoy them when driving around the countryside with my dad though – he’ll just cringe and shake his head in disgust.

My dad actually spent much of his career as a finish carpenter, and yeah, he’s known for being very meticulous. While he has helped us out with plenty of stuff on our house (deck, interior stuff, etc.), he didn’t actually build it. We bought it as a new build from a local builder (Godbout Development). But as you can imagine, when we were house shopping, we had my dad visit the top candidates to get his thoughts as an expert. When he signed off on this one, we knew it was a quality build.

I’m pretty sure the main component is as Will suggested – really good insulation. I remember our builder and the home inspector both mentioning that. It looks like everything in zones 5 through 8 currently calls for R49 to R60 in the attic, so I’m sure they hit that mark at least. Part of why we don’t have any icicles may be due to the fact that we do have gutters, so they’d catch any liquid that would fall off the roof. But if you look at the snow on the roof, you can see that it’s an even stack, similar to what’s out there on elevated surfaces at ambient temperature. That suggests that melting from the roof is pretty minimal. Obviously when it rains, we’re going to have water percolate through that snowpack and get to the gutters, but if temperatures are above freezing, that water will simply flow through the normal system and drain out.

I was just finishing up a ski tour this afternoon when I got a text alert that we’d been put under a Winter Storm Watch. Obviously the BTV NWS is concerned enough by what they’re seeing in the modeling to put up a preliminary alert. We’re not to the point yet that our point forecast lays out all the potential accumulation, but they do have a headline out that suggests 6 to 9 inches of snow are possible from Monday into Tuesday. The latest BTV NWS alert and projected accumulations maps are below:

No, definitely no gutter heaters; I’ve never even heard of them, and I’m sure my dad would have talked about them if he built them into any of our houses. Our builder here never said anything about them, and I’ve been up there enough times to have a good familiarity with the setup of our gutters at this point.

That’s interesting - is that gutter/climate stuff really true? I have to assume we’re in a pretty cold/snowy climate up here in the mountains of NVT, and lots of people have gutters. I think I’ve had gutters on just about every house I’ve lived in up here in NVT. My dad is a carpenter/contractor, and one thing I’ve known since I was a kid is that if you have icicles of any sort on your house, it’s bad news. It means you’re losing heat and the issue should be addressed. I remember complaining as a kid to my dad about how we never had any icicles on our houses, and I thought it was a bummer because they looked cool. He’d chastise me of course, telling me the reality of the situation. I will say, we’ve been in our current house for ~14 years, and through all these crazy winters, I’ve never seen an icicle on the house. So obviously places can be built in a way to address the issue. Maybe the gutters catch any liquid that comes off the roof? The thing is, the snow on our roof never seems to melt anyway, it just sits there all winter and slowly disappears in the spring. One winter, when the snow on the roof was really stacking up, I asked our builder if we should ever consider clearing snow from the roof. He laughed and said “Nope, your place is built to code for your location; you’ll never have to worry about that.” So, I never touch the snow on the roof. Our builders for this house definitely know their stuff, and they built with gutters and we’ve had no issues of any sort. I do of course clean out the gutters each fall to get rid of the leaves, but other than that, there hasn’t been anything else to address.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard you mention it before, but January is, in general, the perfect time of the season to have those positive departures. Obviously we’re not looking to get warm-sectored in storms, but something warmer and wetter than sitting under arctic high pressure is definitely preferred in my book. If given the choice between dealing with subzero days or actually getting into the storm track, we know what most skiers would probably choose. I’m not sure what the departures were this January, but it sort of played out the way one would draw it up. We had an active month with 12 storms, roughly average snowfall, and no huge thaws that I can think of. One preferably wants those notable negative temperature departures on the fringes of the season in October, November, March, and April. Actually, warm Octobers are awesome, so those are nice either way. There are only going to be so many ski days in October anyway, even when it’s below average. There’s not much point to an above average April unless you really want to get the corn snow going, but there’s always May for that. Aprils where the powder just keeps coming are great, and can ensure the snowpack is still plentiful in May.

I’d also meant to comment on the late season stuff – and I’d say that’s exactly right. Once we get into late March and April, we can get those more marginal temperature, elevation-dependent events, and that’s when your area is going to have an extra advantage vs. the lower elevation spots. We’ll often still get some snow out of a system down in the valley, but if temperatures are marginal, it’s not going to accumulate as 50:1 fluff, it might just be a slushy coating. So the advantage of those types of frequent, fluffy snowfalls decreases around here in the late season. Over the course of the season, it’s typically a mix of those bigger synoptic systems and the bread and butter events. The big systems are definitely less frequent, and much more hit or miss, and if you miss out on a couple relative to nearby areas (or if they just don’t occur) it can have a bigger impact on some locations vs. others. As you pointed out with your numbers, the bread and butter upslope systems probably contribute just a bit more to our snowfall climatology here in the Northern Greens, so if those are predominating we’ll be doing relatively well.

Event totals: 0.1” Snow/Trace L.E. We had light snow falling at observations time this morning, and it seemed beyond the point where it would have been associated with Winter Storm Roland. This was that sort of precipitation that doesn’t really show up on radar, but the BTV NWS AFD indicates that we’ve got a weak upper-level disturbance affecting the area, so presumably the precipitation is associated with that feature. Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations: New Snow: 0.1 inches New Liquid: Trace Temperature: 5.9 F Sky: Light Snow (1-2 mm flakes) Snow at the stake: 22.5 inches

You know, it’s interesting, we haven’t really had any of those stretches where snowfall has really gone off the hook by Northern Greens standards – we talked about that solid week we had a little while back, but it fell short of really being stratospheric or anything. What we’ve had in the past few weeks though has been that nice steady pace of snowfall, bread and butter systems intermixed with the occasional larger synoptic storm. And that snowfall has indeed been steady – since the start of the calendar year here at our site, we’ve only had four days without snowfall. We haven’t had any massive blockbusters up here, but in many ways it’s felt like a fairly classic Northern Greens winter period since about the start of the calendar year. I hadn’t planned to ski today, but with the way it was snowing those huge flakes here at the house, and once we picked up 2.5” in an hour, I started to reconsider. I checked out the Bolton Valley Base Area Webcam and saw just a whiteout of massive flakes, and that pretty much sealed the deal. I told the boys that if we they didn’t have any meetings this morning, we definitely needed to head up to the mountain for some turns. And so we did. We just stuck to Timberline, and skier traffic was low enough that there really wasn’t any need to go anywhere else. We started with a run on Adam’s Solitude, but spent the rest of the day in Doug’s Woods and Doug’s Solitude. Bolton is reporting 12” in the past 48 hours, but we were typically finding 12-16” off piste in the areas we were skiing. The snow was absolute champagne, definitely in line with the ~2% H2O I’d gotten from my previous three snow analyses at the house, so it skied like a dream. The boys had fun throwing themselves off just about any stump, bump, log, tree, ledge, or cliff they found. And, Mother Nature even decided to treat us with some sun during the morning to let us get a bit more pop out of the photos from the session. A few shots from this morning:

Sure, but we hear about these sorts of anecdotal reports/complaints all the time. How much credibility should they be given vs. the measurements made by the resort? Personally, I just don’t have much faith in the average skier’s ability to measure snowfall accurately and objectively, and you’re talking to someone who literally skis around with a calibrated depth gauge on his ski pole. We’ve talked about it in the thread before, but between super-dry snow settling subsequent the early morning measurement, potentially dramatic differences in accumulation at summit or base elevations with upslope snow, drifting, etc. they are definitely going to be discrepancies between the depths that the resort reports and what depths people encounter (or think they encounter) on the slopes. The thing is, PF will be the first to tell you that Jay Peak appears to get at least a marginal bump in annual snowfall over the Mansfield area. And yes, we know that Jay Peak’s snowfall measurement is more casual than the rigorous work that PF does, but how far off can they really be? It’s not as if they’re reporting 700” a year or something. Even if they’re reporting 10 or 20% more than what PF reports, that’s probably reasonably close to reality for that peak. If they were constantly fudging the numbers to any great degree, they’d end up with some outrageous total relative to the rest of the resorts in the Northern Greens, and the numbers just don’t seem to come out that way. I was going to say that bwt would be the person to ask, since he’s literally living there and observing the day-to-day snowfall, but it looks like he already chimed in.

Oh, absolutely, I don’t think you’ve ever given that impression at all. If anything, it would be the exact opposite in your case – you literally live up here in the mountains of NNE and see the snowfall trends first hand.

This is why it’s so useful to have more and more diligent observers throughout the mountains of NNE participating in the thread here. You’re literally observing, over the course of an actual season, what the deal is with snowfall in the Northern Greens. That ratios you’re talking about above are literally the type of seasonal snowfall ratios that bump the Northern Greens snowfall up each year relative to the surrounding ranges. Yeah, Jay Peak will sometimes pull off a 60” storm cycle because they got right in the pivot point of a big system and/or sat under a mesoscale snow band, and then the low went and parked itself up in Northern Maine for another 48 hours before departing, but it’s not as if the Northern Greens specifically get hit with more synoptic storms. Getting hit by the pivot point or ending up in some meso band from a big synoptic storm is fairly random, and those sort of things will typically average out over a season or two across the region. But it’s the extra bit of upslope at the end of storms, or those extra one, two, or a few inches from so many bread and butter events over the course of a very long season that really make the difference. The number of times I’ve seen casual/semi-casual observers catch wind of the 300”+ snowfall averages that the local resorts report, and then immediately call it “marketing B.S.”, is too numerous to recall. “Yeah, right, all of the snowiest resorts in NY, NH, and ME get 200” or so of snowfall a season, and these VT resorts are the only ones that get 300”+… yeah, right.” “Oh, and don’t get me started on Jay Peak, the biggest liar of them all, reporting their 350”+ snowfall that they slant-stick from a drift.” Yeah, it’s all one big fat conspiracy. All four resorts along the spine of the Northern Greens conspire each day to make sure they jack up their totals so they can claim to have the most snowfall in the Eastern U.S. Because everyone knows, that’s the main driver that delivers the customers and makes everyone rich. And those so called “snow reporters” like PF, they’re the most culpable purveyors in the whole charade. They’re all in on it. They get together on the phone each morning before reporting to confer on just how much they’re going to inflate the day’s snow totals so that everyone stays nicely in their north-to-south-snowfall hierarchy. Don’t tell on us, and we won’t tell on you. The photos PF takes of the snowfall at the stake every day to try and accurately document the season’s snowfall? Totally doctored… of course.

Yeah, I was both east and west of the spine in my travels today, and it was obvious that the accumulations fell off in both directions. It wasn't as if the full 8.2" from Winter Storm Roland fell in one shot overnight though; that’s a total from back when the system started, representing a span of probably 30 to 36 hours. But seeing the totals drop off away from the spine, and picking up 2.5” in an hour this morning, yeah…

Event totals: 8.2” Snow/0.24” L.E. Details from the 12:00 P.M. Waterbury observations: New Snow: 2.7 inches New Liquid: 0.06 inches Snow/Water Ratio: 45.0 Snow Density: 2.2% H2O Temperature: 28.9 F Sky: Partly Cloudy Snow at the stake: 24.5 inches

Rates have definitely been impressive here, with 2.5” in the past hour – from the radar it does look like this pulse might be ending though.

You can really see it on the Bolton Valley Base Area Webcam. Even though there’s not a massive amount of liquid pounding down from the sky, with such lofty 50:1 flakes, it stacks up quickly – I just measured 1.3” of accumulation in under 30 minutes, so that’s technically in the 2-3”/hr range. Naturally, it wouldn’t come out that way over the course of hours due to how fast 50:1 snow settles, but it definitely stacks fast.

Event totals: 5.5” Snow/0.16” L.E. I guess those mesoscale models were onto something with respect to the backside snow of this system around here, because we’ve picked up more accumulation with this recent activity than we did from the initial part of the storm. We picked up 0.5” of snow through midnight last night, but I woke up earlier to find very large flakes pouring down and continuing to stack up quickly with impressive loft. The pulses of moisture crashing into the spine are very obvious on the radar: Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations: New Snow: 2.7 inches New Liquid: 0.05 inches Snow/Water Ratio: 54.0 Snow Density: 1.9% H2O Temperature: 12.7 F Sky: Snow (10-25 mm flakes) Snow at the stake: 23.5 inches

Another batch is just coming into the area now:

Event totals: 2.3” Snow/0.12” L.E. Details from the 6:00 P.M. Waterbury observations: New Snow: 1.6 inches New Liquid: 0.10 inches Snow/Water Ratio: 16.0 Snow Density: 6.3% H2O Temperature: 15.3 F Sky: Cloudy Snow at the stake: 21.5 inches

Of course, as we know, “paltry” and “surprise” are all relative up here when it comes to snow. It seems that any system that gets enough moisture up here for flakes, or even if the lakes just feed moisture in, often just keeps the snow coming until the mountains have wrung it all out. Actually, some of the mesoscale models like the NAM have this system passing through today, another flare up of snowfall overnight into Wednesday, then a band of snow dropping south on Thursday, and that next potential system on Sunday. We’ll see how it goes, but it looks active enough to keep some refreshes going for the slopes.

Event totals: 0.7” Snow/0.02” L.E. This next system had been named Winter Storm Roland, and it was already underway as of observations time this morning. Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations: New Snow: 0.7 inches New Liquid: 0.02 inches Snow/Water Ratio: 35.0 Snow Density: 2.9% H2O Temperature: 8.4 F Sky: Light Snow (3-10 mm flakes) Snow at the stake: 20.0 inches