NNE Cold Season Thread 2025-2026

[mreaves]

43 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

Posting here instead of the main thread lol. 

It's frigid. This is man cold right here. It's 12 degrees and with the wind it's pretty rough out there. Of course, sunny with snow showers.

12.2/6 

The temp has been dropped all day.  We are at 15°/10.1° and its windy. 

[powderfreak]

December 11th and we have already measured roughly 33% of the seasonal snowfall at the Mt Mansfield plots.

I know I harp on this, but I think the measured part is important when comparing years.  If it’s not measured, but eyeballed, guessed, estimated… it’s hard to compare year to year.  It becomes more vibe based, than data based.

Both methods can tell a story, but this season being at 30+% of annual measured snow (in a controlled manner) is incredible to me… as someone who’s personally been involved in the process for almost 20 years now.

This isn’t a marketing ploy.  The various data points support it.

Last year at this time the FourRunner Quad had been running for exactly one week.  This year it’s been 3+ weeks of deep, skier supporting natural snowpack.

 

[WxWatcher007]

1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

December 11th and we have already measured roughly 33% of the seasonal snowfall at the Mt Mansfield plots.

I know I harp on this, but I think the measured part is important when comparing years.  If it’s not measured, but eyeballed, guessed, estimated… it’s hard to compare year to year.  It becomes more vibe based, than data based.

Both methods can tell a story, but this season being at 30+% of annual measured snow (in a controlled manner) is incredible to me… as someone who’s personally been involved in the process for almost 20 years now.

This isn’t a marketing ploy.  The various data points support it.

Last year at this time the FourRunner Quad had been running for exactly one week.  This year it’s been 3+ weeks of deep, skier supporting natural snowpack.

 

All the local folks I talk to say this start to winter has been wild. 

We're over 40" on the season now.

Hovering around 10 degrees with -SN. 

[WxWatcher007]

Another 2.1 overnight into this morning. I knew something good happened when I heard the plow this morning. 

-SN and 12.3 now. Next week might feel like summer given the pattern we've been in so far. 

[timp]

Hell of a way to start a winter! 15” the past three days and 42” on the season so far. Upslope crushed pretty good last night/this morning to the tune of an additional 8”. Almost 20” otg. 

[WxWatcher007]

Upslope snow is beautiful. I got another inch of powder here today. Dendrites stacked on one another. 

[powderfreak]

Mansfield stake goes over 5 feet and beats the previous earliest 60”+ depth by two weeks.

 

Skiing is all-time, just like the depths.

[J.Spin]

As of yesterday morning, we’d already picked up 7 to 8 inches of snow in the valley from our most recent clipper, and Bolton Valley was reporting 8 inches in the past 48 hours. So, consistent with what PF had mentioned, it didn’t seem like there wasn’t a huge elevation gradient for accumulations up to that point in the storm.

We were actually in a snowfall lull at that point – the front side of the storm had wound down, but the back side precipitation was quickly moving into the area. Indeed, as I ascended the Bolton Valley Access Road in the morning, I drove right up into heavy snowfall as the first bands of snow from the back side of the storm were hitting the mountain. I geared up for a tour at the Timberline Base amidst huge flakes of snow falling in the range of 1 to 2 inches/hour. Clothing and gear were getting covered so fast that I was constantly having to shake off the snow.

During my previous outing on Monday, I’d found powder depths of roughly 8-12” around 1,500’ at the Timberline Base and 12-16” up near the 2,500’ level. Yesterday I’d say you could tack on a couple more inches to those general powder depths. Even though a lot more snow fell than that, my liquid analyses revealed that we had a solid period of 10-11% H2O snow during the day on Wednesday with all those small flakes, so that would have compressed the existing powder a bit. Fortunately, the density of the snow had dropped down to around 5-6% H2O by Wednesday night, so if there had been any perturbing of the powder grading with that denser snow, it had been largely restored by Thursday morning. Coinciding with that denser snow that fell Wednesday, this most recent storm did have the advantage of bringing more liquid equivalent to the snowpack. Whereas our previous Clipper brough a bit more than a quarter of an inch of liquid equivalent here at our site, this one had already brough a half inch as of yesterday morning, which would likely mean that between a half inch and an inch of liquid equivalent fell in the mountains.

So although the powder skiing yesterday wasn’t quite as light and airy as it was on Monday, it was still right-side-up, and the added liquid equivalent more than made up for it with the ability to charge a bit harder on steeper terrain.

[Boston Bulldog]

I think Jankoski typically does a pretty good job (if a but optimistic) for forecasting amounts along the spine. I will say, I do not see any support for this 4-8” call at MRG! Hoping he’s right though

[NW_of_GYX]

The east facing ravines on mt. Washington are a month ahead of schedule. The whites don’t do snow like the northern greens buts it’s a been a great start to the season in the presidential range. Photo from today. Notice the big crown lines from a natural avalanche cycle that occurred sometime in the last 24 hours




.

[J.Spin]

As of yesterday morning, Bolton Valley was reporting 14 inches of new snow from our latest clipper system, and 2 feet total for the week up to that point, so another visit to the mountain seemed in order. Being an early season Friday, I expected the usual spattering of early season visitors at the resort, but I was quite surprised when I arrived at the Village to find a multitude of cars – I wound up parking down in the 4^th tier of the main parking lots. As I made my way toward the base of Wilderness to start my ski tour, I realized why all the visitors were at the mountain – the Wilderness Chair was running! I hadn’t checked the snow report that morning, but apparently along with the Vista Quad terrain the resort was running the Wilderness terrain on 100% natural snow. That’s certainly a sign of how thing early season has gone thus far – to have the entirety of Wilderness open for lift-served skiing before even hitting the middle of December is definitely ahead of the usual seasonal progression.

I quickly shifted gears and decided to tour on the Backcountry Network. Based on my visits to the mountain so far this season, it was obvious that the backcountry had been skiable for quite some time, but this was my first chance to really see how the terrain was doing with the current snowpack. I wasn’t sure how far I was going to go, but I started up the Bryant Trail, and before I knew it I was at the Bryant Cabin. I made a descent in some of the untracked terrain between JJ’s and Big Blue, then switched over to Coyote and finished with some of the lower glades. Despite all the visitors to the resort, it was clear that the new lift-served offerings were the big draw – I saw very few people while I was out on the Backcountry Network, and untracked snow was a very plentiful commodity. Although not as intense as what I experienced on Friday, light to moderate snow was falling during my tour, so the snowpack just continues to get topped off with fresh coatings.

In term of describing the snow and ski conditions, you can pretty quickly run out of superlatives, but the numbers don’t lie. I toured in the 2,000’ – 2,700’ elevation range, and the untouched areas offer powder depths of 2 to 2½ feet atop the most recent subsurface layer. Based on the Mt. Mansfield Stake, the snowpack in the higher elevations of the Northern Greens has now topped 5 feet, so even for some of the steepest terrain, coverage is getting quite good. You can tell that the snowpack is still settling, so coverage isn’t quite the same as a snowpack of that depth that’s had a couple of months to settle and consolidate, but it’s pretty darned good for the first half of December.

On my way back to my car at the end of my tour, I was met by a Bolton Valley employee who was checking passes, and he was able to get me my backcountry tag for the season right there by electronically entering my pass information. The tags are yellow this year, and I’m not sure if it was just coincidence that I had my pass checked on my very first backcountry day, but it made me wonder if they are going to increase the vigilance on monitoring tickets on the Nordic & Backcountry Network this year. In any event, those who are heading out right now are definitely getting their money’s worth in terms of snowpack depths and snow quality.

[J.Spin]

My colleague Mark arrived at UVM yesterday for some work in the proteomics core, and after we spent the morning in the lab getting some samples ready for analysis, he was wondering if I wanted to head out for a backcountry tour at Bolton Valley. Mark is a big Nordic skier, but he also likes to get out for some Telemark skiing from time to time, and with current conditions around here, this was definitely one of those times. He knows Bolton’s Nordic terrain quite well, but I was more than happy to bring him on a fun tour through some of Bolton’s classic backcountry glades. I would probably have been heading out for an afternoon tour anyway, even if he hadn’t asked – the conditions are just so good right now that it’s simply a great time to get out for turns.

We headed up to Bryant Cabin as I’d done yesterday and took a slightly different descent that brought us through the Gotham City area and down to the Telemark Practice Slope. The resort was reporting another few inches of snow since yesterday’s snow report, so in terms of conditions, just tack on another few inches to the depths that were out there yesterday. We were still touring in the 2,000 – 2,700’ elevation range, and my depth checks on the powder were hitting 30 inches. Skiing in powder in that 2 to 3-foot range is definitely a different experience than your typical 1-foot powder day, and fat skis are undoubtedly your friend on days like these. Mark was on mid-fat boards with 85 mm at the waist, and they did fine, but he could see the benefits of having 100+ mm skis with more rocker for the depths of powder we were dealing with.

The weather was great today, with temperatures in the mid-20s F and light snow falling for much of the tour to keep that snowpack topped off. Being a Saturday, the Nordic & Backcountry Network was busier than yesterday, but there are still tons of untouched lines out there in most glades, and we’ve got another system affecting the area tonight that could add accumulations of another inch or two.