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NNE Cold Season Thread 2023/2024


bwt3650
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19 hours ago, dmcginvt said:

Curious about the MRG vs Bush.  Bush may only be going by their cam sites?  It was tough with all the wind.  Look at that 24 stowe cam.  The board gains nothing while the blown in piles up behind it :)  I loved see that.  Almost looked like it wanted to buried the thermo

I’ve put the final north to south list of storm totals for the Vermont ski areas below – there is still a bit of MRG vs. Sugarbush discrepancy, so I’m not sure exactly where that came from, but it looks like totals for this storm cycle topped out around 30 inches.

Jay Peak: 28”

Burke: 21”

Smuggler’s Notch: 21”

Stowe: 21”

Bolton Valley: 24”

Mad River Glen: 30”

Sugarbush: 23”

Middlebury: 21”

Pico: 27”

Killington: 27”

Okemo: 18”

Bromley: 14”

Magic Mountain: 15”

Stratton: 15”

Mount Snow: 10”

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3 hours ago, Ginx snewx said:

No shit

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Yeah and that guy often seems to be a bit under what I get.  He’s next to the Public Safety building on RT 100 which often seems just slightly warmer in marginal events. I just didn’t bother measuring the “new” and was just pacing it by what was on the ground.

That first day we had 4” slop that melted back to 2” before the upslope started.  There was around 8” in my yard at the end of it all yesterday evening.  Could’ve had 10-11” if measuring and clearing I’d assume.

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Yeah and that guy often seems to be a bit under what I get.  He’s next to the Public Safety building on RT 100 which often seems just slightly warmer in marginal events. I just didn’t bother measuring the “new” and was just pacing it by what was on the ground.
That first day we had 4” slop that melted back to 2” before the upslope started.  There was around 8” in my yard at the end of it all yesterday evening.  Could’ve had 10-11” if measuring and clearing I’d assume.

Is that a 50 spot over Mansfield and jay on the gfs? One of the better fantasy clowns of the season. Not gonna happen, but with the highs and lows of this season, nothing would surprise me. I don’t think we’ve seen our last melt out to snorkel day.


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18 hours ago, Jebman said:

Absolutely EPIC. Glad you guys got some decent resurfacing snow. I wish it had been four feet.

It looks like totals topped out around 30 inches, so not quite 4 feet, but there’s a lot of liquid equivalent in the snow and it definitely delivered in that regard – great skiing and riding!

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3 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

It looks like totals topped out around 30 inches, so not quite 4 feet, but there’s a lot of liquid equivalent in the snow and it definitely delivered in that regard – great skiing and riding!

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I am very, very happy for you! Get out there and ENJOY THAT SNOW! I WANNA SEE YOU CATCH SOME AIR! Stay safe!

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4 hours ago, AstronomyEnjoyer said:

Going to stretch the definition of NNE and sneak some photos from MBY in. River is ice free now, and what little snow there is will be gone in the next couple days. Might be the last "cold season" photos I take back there.

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You’ll find the NNE thread is more laid back and welcoming than the main thread. We (well at least me) are more tolerant of exotic model clown maps. 

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17 minutes ago, bwt3650 said:


You seem to know the models well..why is everything painting rain this weekend in northern vt with 850s well below freezing? Are they missing elevation?


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Yes.  The Mesos have the snow for the peaks.  The globals won’t see it on the larger grid.

I’d cut this in half as it won’t be 10:1 ratios but it’s likely a sloppy snow above 2,500-3,000ft in our areas.

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As our most recent storm cycle progressed into its second half on Monday, it brought prodigious upslope snowfall, but heavy winds also pounded the upper mountain areas at Bolton Valley. That meant that the Vista Quad Chair never ran on Monday, so all that fresh snow would still be sitting there for Tuesday.

For my older son, Tuesday was one of his days off from work, so the two of us headed up to the mountain for a ski session. At this point in the ski season we’re well past President’s Day and school vacation week, it’s mid-March, and yesterday was just a random midweek Tuesday - we didn’t expect a lot of visitors to the mountain. Apparently nobody told the skiers about that though – we arrived up in the Village within a half hour of lift opening, and we were already having to park all the way down by the Sports Center, in an impromptu middle lane of cars. Where did all these people come from? What we eventually discovered was that every parent in the state had decided to pull their kids out of school for the day to get in some skiing. On our Vista lift rides, we literally paired up with multiple dads and their kids who had done this, so apparently it was the thing to do!

The weather yesterday was absolutely clear with brilliant March sunshine, so it was quite a contrast to Monday’s snowy maelstrom, but winds were still brisk near the summits. Despite the bit of remaining wind, overall yesterday had that “day after” the storm feel. The new snow from the storm had been pounded and scoured in exposed areas like the tops of trails near the Vista Summit, but thankfully most terrain was protected enough to hold onto quite an excellent bounty of soft accumulations from the storm. There was a bit of wind crust in areas depending on exposure, but nothing that ruined the skiing aside from reducing the explosiveness of the powder relative to Monday’s consistency in the more exposed areas. My snow depth checks revealed the same roughly two feet of accumulation that I’d found near the middle of day on Monday, so there was probably some additional accumulation and continued settling that left things about where they were.

We prioritized hitting some of the steepest terrain to really make use of the resurfacing that the storm brought us, so we visited areas like Devil’s Playground and the Vista Glades, which I hadn’t yet visited at all this season. There were still a lot of nice areas of untracked snow, but areas that had seen skier traffic still provided top notch conditions. The storm was so potent that even the steepest terrain has the coverage to keep you from encountering the old base snow, so you can just drop into anything and anticipate your edges biting into packed powder without the worry of touching the crusty stuff underneath. Along with the steeps, we also visited some of our favorite areas for powder turns, and as long as the snow was protected from the winds, it was still delivering that cold smoke that we enjoyed on Monday.

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Killington was very crowded yesterday for a Tuesday, though still very manageable. This week is spring break for Toronto folks, so lots of Canadians to chat with on the lifts. I remember that Toronto spring break was also an epic snow week last year, so I'm developing a Pavlovian fondness for people from Toronto.

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1 hour ago, borderwx said:

33F with flakes and rain in the air for the dog run this morning

Burke reporting 5 at the summit/ J 3. The once a year event where Burke out performs J:)

Good omen for the weekend

It was a great week of skiing, love March8cd7003c849006aca911c8a934f37e3f.jpg


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Gorgeous 

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This morning I was seeing reports of 2 to 5 inches of new snow for the resorts of the Central and Northern Greens. Snow levels were relatively high, thus the accumulations were likely to be fairly dense, but that would mean the liquid equivalent could be there for some decent resurfacing of the slopes. I wasn’t actually sure how much resurfacing would be needed, but the past couple of days have had some spring-like warmth and sun at times, and I haven’t been up to the hill during that time, so there would be plenty for me to discover about the state of the snowpack.

Heading up to Bolton, light rain in the valley didn’t actually change over to snow until just below 2,000’, so indeed snow levels were relatively high as expected. With the anticipated snow levels, I’d planned to ski out of the main base area, and the elevation of the snow line confirmed that I likely wouldn’t be heading down to the Timberline elevations for my outing.

The resort only indicated a couple inches of new accumulation in their early morning report, but that was either very early and/or from the base elevations, because I definitely found more than that up high. I started off with an Alta Vista run, and I’m not sure when it was groomed, but I’d say 2 to 3 inches of dense powder atop the groomed surface would be a good description of what I found there. Turns there in the untracked snow above the groomed surface were ~75% bottomless on 86 mm mid-fats, so I was occasionally touching down to the firmer surface below, but overall it was quite a pleasant and surfy experience. Off piste, things were a bit different. At the Wilderness Summit above 3,000’ I measured what seemed to be 5 to 6 inches of new snow, but it was a little challenging to get exact numbers. In many areas off piste, especially up high, the new dense snow has simply bonded into the underlying snowpack and you can’t find an interface. I can’t say exactly at what elevation that changes, but it’s most pronounced up high where the snowpack presumably has seen fewer or less intense freeze-thaw processes over the past couple of days. Off piste turns were especially good up in those high elevation areas, but in general I found that everything off piste in all but the lowest areas of the main mountain delivered consistent bottomless turns thanks to the dense snow.

The freezing line  seem to sit right around 2,200’ for most of the morning while I was there, and that was based on the fact that the snow got sticky for roughly the last 100’ of vertical on my runs. As midday approached, the freezing line seemed like it began to rise because on my last run I’d say the stickiness of the snow started to appear about 200’ above the base.

It was really quiet at the resort this morning, being a random March Friday without a major publicized snowstorm, but I did ride the Vista Quad with a guy who had come up from Northampton, Massachusetts. He’s and Indy Pass owner, his home mountain is Berkshire East, and with Bolton Valley being on the Indy Pass as well, it was a perfect fit for a trip. He said it’s been a rough season down there at Berkshire East, at least in terms of natural snow. Thankfully they were able to get by fine on manmade terrain, but he was blown away by the natural snowpack at Bolton. From about Mid Mountain on up during our lift ride, when the surroundings really started to get white, he could not stop talking about all the snow. He said he really needed this trip for his overall state of mind because it’s been so long since he’s seen snow around his area, and from looking at the Berkshire East Webcams, I can see what he means. He’s really lamenting that fact that he thinks this is only going to continue to get worse with climate change. With the way the last couple of seasons have gone with regard to snowfall down in Southern New England, I can understand why it’s so depressing. He’s a passionate backcountry skier as well, and I definitely wanted to ask if he’d considered the idea of relocating to somewhere like NNE or the Rockies etc. with more reliable snowfall, but I didn’t get a chance to go there before our lift ride ended.

Looking ahead on the weather models, it seems like we’ll have snow chances right on through to the end of the month and beyond. That’s typically par for the course during March and April, but getting snow becomes more fickle toward the end of the season, and sometimes the supply of new snow just shuts off due to above average temperatures.

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All respect to High Road but I gotta say J.Spin always delivers the most accurate and detailed local snow report right here on the forum. It's much appreciated and always helps me make good skiing choices for the coming days.

Stowe and MRG get the nod for runners up hah

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13 hours ago, J.Spin said:

I see that the BTV NWS created a final storm total map for the system earlier in the week – it seems like a decent match with their Event Total Snowfall map in many areas. It was certainly on track around here at the spine of the Northern Greens.

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I mean, that’s pretty amazing stuff that VT forecast vs reality.  Hats off to WFO BTV.  It did work out very much how the models said it would, with a touch of local knowledge added in.

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1 hour ago, Froude said:

All respect to High Road but I gotta say J.Spin always delivers the most accurate and detailed local snow report right here on the forum. It's much appreciated and always helps me make good skiing choices for the coming days.

Stowe and MRG get the nod for runners up hah

He does, and JSpin has been doing it for over 30 years now online.  Legend.  I remember his detailed trip reports back on the SkiVT-Listserve on the UVM servers in the 1990s.  Those were the days.  Think I had just discovered the skiing internet in High School.

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All respect to High Road but I gotta say J.Spin always delivers the most accurate and detailed local snow report right here on the forum. It's much appreciated and always helps me make good skiing choices for the coming days.
Stowe and MRG get the nod for runners up hah

Factual, unemotional and with an incredible understanding of this area’s micro-climate. I’ve learned so much from him and PF in the last 6 years of being up here regularly. Just need to get out and ski with them at some point.

The regular forums are fun, but I really enjoy coming in here when a break from the drama is needed and to get a little grounded from the roller coaster that winter in the north east is.


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Another little white coating last night up high.  Above 2500ft has picked up a decent little shot of frozen QPF over past two days.  Dense and creamy.
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Flipping between grapple and snow here. I agree the snow above 2500’ is very good. Heavy, but enjoyable.


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