powderfreak Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 14 hours ago, Boston Bulldog said: Couldn’t recall if that stat was just a single station or the whole state. I thought whole state, but the anomaly would be crazy high for such a large area. I’m assuming this is BTV or Morristown now that I’m thinking of it. Insane statistic regardless, and pretty surprising that snowfall numbers were still pretty good up high. Lots of elevation dependent events that year What's interesting though is that it is still plenty cold enough to snow at those departures. It gets close, but it's just cold enough in the MVL climate. Dec '23... +7.8 (37/24, mean temp of 31F) Jan '24... +8.1 (30/17, mean temp of 23F) Feb '24... +8.4 (37/15, mean temp of 26F) Average... +8.1 So despite being +8... the climate is such that it is still salvageable for snowfall as the mean temps are all below freezing. What's crazy to me is a +8 in January is still a solid 30/17 month that averages out well below freezing. Add in elevation and the mountains are certainly still cold enough for snowfall even at those departures. However, I go look at BTV, which was averaging around +6 to +7 during that time, and their mean temperatures show a more difficult to snow profile. Which likely fits with a sharper low level gradient that winter. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mreaves Posted June 26 Share Posted June 26 1 hour ago, powderfreak said: What's interesting though is that it is still plenty cold enough to snow at those departures. It gets close, but it's just cold enough in the MVL climate. Which made these winters exceedingly awful from a winter sports perspective, aside from skiing at a resort with good snowmaking. The pack would repeatedly get wiped or severely reduced. The ground never froze and ice was sketchy on the lakes and ponds. 1 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Spin Posted June 27 Share Posted June 27 On 6/26/2025 at 1:34 PM, J.Spin said: -As mreaves noted, the depth of the winter snowpack was on the low side, however. The maximum snow depth at our site for that season was 16.0” vs. a mean of 26.4”, and the 768 snow depth days was about half of average. So at least in the lower valleys in our area, the winter snowpack was present for a typical duration, but its depth didn’t seem to be as robust as usual. If the results above really came from a +7-8 F December through February period, that potentially bodes well in a warming climate though. If the lowest valleys can pull off a decent season in that situation, then the mountains should have no problem doing that with even greater temperature anomalies. Jay Peak reported 369” of snowfall for the 2023-2024 season, so it was similar to our site with respect to running about average. On 6/26/2025 at 2:03 PM, powderfreak said: What's interesting though is that it is still plenty cold enough to snow at those departures. It gets close, but it's just cold enough in the MVL climate. Dec '23... +7.8 (37/24, mean temp of 31F) Jan '24... +8.1 (30/17, mean temp of 23F) Feb '24... +8.4 (37/15, mean temp of 26F) Average... +8.1 So despite being +8... the climate is such that it is still salvageable for snowfall as the mean temps are all below freezing. What's crazy to me is a +8 in January is still a solid 30/17 month that averages out well below freezing. Add in elevation and the mountains are certainly still cold enough for snowfall even at those departures. However, I go look at BTV, which was averaging around +6 to +7 during that time, and their mean temperatures show a more difficult to snow profile. Which likely fits with a sharper low level gradient that winter. On 6/26/2025 at 3:12 PM, mreaves said: Which made these winters exceedingly awful from a winter sports perspective, aside from skiing at a resort with good snowmaking. The pack would repeatedly get wiped or severely reduced. The ground never froze and ice was sketchy on the lakes and ponds. The data I’ve seen indicate that snowfall was decent at most low and high elevation sites around here for the 2023-2024 season, and it looks like it was just the valley snowpack that was on the lean side. The 2023-2024 mountain snowpack appears to be fine based on the Mt. Mansfield Snow Stake data. The black lines on the plot below are for the average snowpack depths and the 2023-2024 snowpack depths, and the red line is for the data from the current season. The 2023-2024 data certainly has its ups and downs, but it comes out pretty close to the average overall. At least for the Northern Greens, it wasn’t really the snowmaking that made it a decent ski season (snowmaking only covers a tiny fraction of a resort’s total terrain anyway, so it can’t really turn an awful season into a good one). In this case it seems that there was sufficient natural snowfall and snow preservation to make for a decent mountain snowpack, which goes along with that additional elevation temperature buffer that PF mentions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boston Bulldog Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 On 6/27/2025 at 10:59 AM, J.Spin said: The data I’ve seen indicate that snowfall was decent at most low and high elevation sites around here for the 2023-2024 season, and it looks like it was just the valley snowpack that was on the lean side. The 2023-2024 mountain snowpack appears to be fine based on the Mt. Mansfield Snow Stake data. The black lines on the plot below are for the average snowpack depths and the 2023-2024 snowpack depths, and the red line is for the data from the current season. The 2023-2024 data certainly has its ups and downs, but it comes out pretty close to the average overall. At least for the Northern Greens, it wasn’t really the snowmaking that made it a decent ski season (snowmaking only covers a tiny fraction of a resort’s total terrain anyway, so it can’t really turn an awful season into a good one). In this case it seems that there was sufficient natural snowfall and snow preservation to make for a decent mountain snowpack, which goes along with that additional elevation temperature buffer that PF mentions. What a bizarre winter that was, an incredble hot start wiped out by an insane cutter. The meltout in early March felt like armageddon for the ski season and then boom a huge finish with three high elevation bombs (and an eclipse). I don't think we do as well the next time we pull a +8.1, hopefully that's not for a very long time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Spin Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 19 hours ago, Boston Bulldog said: What a bizarre winter that was, an incredble hot start wiped out by an insane cutter. The meltout in early March felt like armageddon for the ski season and then boom a huge finish with three high elevation bombs (and an eclipse). I don't think we do as well the next time we pull a +8.1, hopefully that's not for a very long time. The winter/ski seasons all blur together for me, which I think is in part due to our climate here in the Northern Greens. While we certainly get memorable storms, the majority of the winter features day after day with light to moderate snowfall events, which don’t stand out as easily from one season to the next. In any case, it’s a good climate to maintain high-quality snow surfaces for skiing and riding, and it’s one of the reasons that I really like having the reports from my ski outings to refresh my memory for specific periods though. I was curious about that strong start you mentioned for the 2023-2024 season, and indeed it does pop up on the plot for the Mt. Mansfield Stake data – the snowpack depth hitting 40 inches in the first half of December is a great place to be, and it quickly gets a lot of off-piste terrain in play. I checked my snowfall numbers and saw that our site in the valley only picked up about a foot of snow in the first half of December, which is below average and certainly not a standout performance. After looking a little closer, I realized that November 2023 also brought us 20 inches of snow in the valley, and that was a big help in priming that great start to December. I hadn’t caught that the first big rise in the 2023-2024 snowpack plot is actually from the end of November, but I see in my data that we had 6 snowstorms in the valley in the last 10 days of the month. On my Bolton outing on the 28th I measured the snowpack depth at 20” at 3,000’ and then on the 29th it was up to 24”. The skiing was great even before the calendar hit December. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Spin Posted July 1 Share Posted July 1 …and then December just continued to deliver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tamarack Posted July 2 Share Posted July 2 On 6/30/2025 at 10:57 PM, Boston Bulldog said: What a bizarre winter that was, an incredble hot start wiped out by an insane cutter. The meltout in early March felt like armageddon for the ski season and then boom a huge finish with three high elevation bombs (and an eclipse). I don't think we do as well the next time we pull a +8.1, hopefully that's not for a very long time. Snow season started great, with 8" paste T-Day night. The 9.3" fell on 12/4-5, bring the pack to 15", tops here for the date. Little did I know that the best was behind; that 4-5 event was the season's biggest and the remainder was mostly spent escaping from serious snowfalls. After the nice 6.3" fluff on 12/24, we had only one event greater than 4". No other winter here can claim that factiod. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J.Spin Posted yesterday at 04:12 AM Share Posted yesterday at 04:12 AM With the conclusion of the lift-served ski season around here, I put together the north to south list of available 2024-2025 snow totals for the Vermont ski areas: Jay Peak: 475” Burke: 176” Smuggler’s Notch: 368” Stowe: 362” Bolton Valley: 375” Mad River Glen: 248” Sugarbush: 281” Pico: 233” Killington: 252” Okemo: 138” Bromley: 168” Magic Mountain: 127” Stratton: 166” Mount Snow: 145” The resorts along the spine of the Northern Greens all reported 350”+ of snowfall on the season, with Jay Peak approaching 500”, so it was certainly a solid performance up here. It looks like snowfall totals were in the 200”-300” range for the Central Greens, which is probably in the decent/average range, and then season totals were in the ~150” range for the Southern Greens. It’s a bit tougher to find season totals for ski areas in other parts of the Northeast, but I did find that Whiteface reported 191” on the season, Cannon reported 174”, and Sugarloaf reported 167”. Many resorts either don’t post their season snowfall total or don’t have it available once they switch the website to summer mode, but everything else I found in a quick search had totals <150”: Wildcat 113”, Attitash 84”, Mount Sunapee 68”, Crotched Mountain 59”. There may be some areas out in the western New York lake-effect zones that had some decent season snowfall totals, but nothing popped up in a quick online search Along with all his data on resorts in the western U.S., Tony Crocker’s website has a specific page for scoring the quality of the ski season in the northern half of Vermont. I put together the powder-adjusted scores for the A-tier ski seasons over the past couple of decades to put in perspective where this past season sits. In the list below, the first number is the overall powder-adjusted season score, and the number in parentheses is the number of A-tier weekends. This past season was around the middle of that pack with respect to its score, and it’s not too surprising that those other three snowfall seasons for which I’d been plotting our site’s snowfall data for comparison (plot posted below) are all in the list as well. All three of those seasons beat this past season in terms of overall ski season score though, with 2007-2008 being the standout. In terms of A-tier weekends, this past season did seem to punch a bit above its weight with 9 of them, and that’s clearly a nod to that stretch of winter weather consistency from the beginning of January right through the beginning of March. In Tony’s full table, you can clearly see all 9 of those A-tier weekends stacked together as a solid block during that period. 2000-2001: 70 (13) 2007-2008: 62 (9) 2014-2015: 56 (11) 2010-2011: 56 (10) 2002-2003: 54 (7) 2018-2019: 54 (8) 2024-2025: 49 (9) 2012-2013: 47 (7) 2013-2014: 47 (7) 2017-2018: 46 (7) 2016-2017: 46 (7) Looking at Tony’s full table of Vermont snow conditions, it was interesting to note that this past season was the first A-level ski season in quite a while – that stretch of five seasons prior to this one is actually the longest period in his records without an A-level result. Checking the snowfall data for my site, it’s not that snowfall was really all that low during those seasons (the mean snowfall for that stretch was within 5% of average), but presumably the winter weather consistency just wasn’t there for A-level status to be obtained. Using the snowfall data for our site as a reference point, A-level ski seasons can certainly be achieved even with snowfall dipping as low as ~10% below average, as revealed by the 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015 seasons. So, consistency in wintry temperatures can apparently go quite a long way. If you can combine both decent snowfall and solid temperature consistency, that’s when you get into some of those really high scoring seasons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boston Bulldog Posted 15 hours ago Share Posted 15 hours ago 12 hours ago, J.Spin said: With the conclusion of the lift-served ski season around here, I put together the north to south list of available 2024-2025 snow totals for the Vermont ski areas: Jay Peak: 475” Burke: 176” Smuggler’s Notch: 368” Stowe: 362” Bolton Valley: 375” Mad River Glen: 248” Sugarbush: 281” Pico: 233” Killington: 252” Okemo: 138” Bromley: 168” Magic Mountain: 127” Stratton: 166” Mount Snow: 145” The resorts along the spine of the Northern Greens all reported 350”+ of snowfall on the season, with Jay Peak approaching 500”, so it was certainly a solid performance up here. It looks like snowfall totals were in the 200”-300” range for the Central Greens, which is probably in the decent/average range, and then season totals were in the ~150” range for the Southern Greens. It’s a bit tougher to find season totals for ski areas in other parts of the Northeast, but I did find that Whiteface reported 191” on the season, Cannon reported 174”, and Sugarloaf reported 167”. Many resorts either don’t post their season snowfall total or don’t have it available once they switch the website to summer mode, but everything else I found in a quick search had totals <150”: Wildcat 113”, Attitash 84”, Mount Sunapee 68”, Crotched Mountain 59”. There may be some areas out in the western New York lake-effect zones that had some decent season snowfall totals, but nothing popped up in a quick online search Along with all his data on resorts in the western U.S., Tony Crocker’s website has a specific page for scoring the quality of the ski season in the northern half of Vermont. I put together the powder-adjusted scores for the A-tier ski seasons over the past couple of decades to put in perspective where this past season sits. In the list below, the first number is the overall powder-adjusted season score, and the number in parentheses is the number of A-tier weekends. This past season was around the middle of that pack with respect to its score, and it’s not too surprising that those other three snowfall seasons for which I’d been plotting our site’s snowfall data for comparison (plot posted below) are all in the list as well. All three of those seasons beat this past season in terms of overall ski season score though, with 2007-2008 being the standout. In terms of A-tier weekends, this past season did seem to punch a bit above its weight with 9 of them, and that’s clearly a nod to that stretch of winter weather consistency from the beginning of January right through the beginning of March. In Tony’s full table, you can clearly see all 9 of those A-tier weekends stacked together as a solid block during that period. 2000-2001: 70 (13) 2007-2008: 62 (9) 2014-2015: 56 (11) 2010-2011: 56 (10) 2002-2003: 54 (7) 2018-2019: 54 (8) 2024-2025: 49 (9) 2012-2013: 47 (7) 2013-2014: 47 (7) 2017-2018: 46 (7) 2016-2017: 46 (7) Looking at Tony’s full table of Vermont snow conditions, it was interesting to note that this past season was the first A-level ski season in quite a while – that stretch of five seasons prior to this one is actually the longest period in his records without an A-level result. Checking the snowfall data for my site, it’s not that snowfall was really all that low during those seasons (the mean snowfall for that stretch was within 5% of average), but presumably the winter weather consistency just wasn’t there for A-level status to be obtained. Using the snowfall data for our site as a reference point, A-level ski seasons can certainly be achieved even with snowfall dipping as low as ~10% below average, as revealed by the 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015 seasons. So, consistency in wintry temperatures can apparently go quite a long way. If you can combine both decent snowfall and solid temperature consistency, that’s when you get into some of those really high scoring seasons. I had never seen Tony’s site before… great stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
powderfreak Posted 15 hours ago Share Posted 15 hours ago 15 minutes ago, Boston Bulldog said: I had never seen Tony’s site before… great stuff! Yeah he’s awesome. I share with him all of our Stowe data each spring. He’s the OG compiler of ski area snowfall info across North America. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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