NNE Cold Season Thread 2025-2026

[powderfreak]

13 hours ago, bwt3650 said:

Shameless plug for my spot, but every year preseason Jay offers a deal for $199, you get 4 lessons, 4 rentals, 4 lift tix and a season pass once you complete the 4 lessons for $199. They also give away that package free to the first 50 or 100 people. And I’ve had friends who have gotten it free, so it’s not just a gimmick.
 

That's a phenomenal deal.

[WxWatcher007]

A little annoying that I can’t buy a flake with this radar, but if it were up at SLK we’d be in mod snow.  

[powderfreak]

14 minutes ago, WxWatcher007 said:

A little annoying that I can’t buy a flake with this radar, but if it were up at SLK we’d be in mod snow.  

You’re learning a lot about NNE climate ha.

[mreaves]

Looks like about 2”

[eyewall]

This came up in my memories from 2017 today:


I am coming up for a visit in late Feb so brace yourselves for a torch lol. 

[WxWatcher007]

1 hour ago, eyewall said:

This came up in my memories from 2017 today:


I am coming up for a visit in late Feb so brace yourselves for a torch lol. 

Spectacular 

[NW_of_GYX]

Just drove back to Maine from the smuggs area The most snow on the ground by far was between Hardwick and Danville, Vermont. What’s up with that zone? A little bit of elevation?

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, NW_of_GYX said:

Just drove back to Maine from the smuggs area The most snow on the ground by far was between Hardwick and Danville, Vermont. What’s up with that zone? A little bit of elevation?

Yeah the interior hills there.  RT 15 gets up near 2,000ft in Walden and that’s a very snowy area.  Some of those towns on the west slope of those hills like Stannard get a ton of snow and preserve it very well.

[NW_of_GYX]

21 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Yeah the interior hills there.  RT 15 gets up near 2,000ft in Walden and that’s a very snowy area.  Some of those towns on the west slope of those hills like Stannard get a ton of snow and preserve it very well.

Seems like a weenie spot, was not really aware of it until now. 

[powderfreak]

5 minutes ago, NW_of_GYX said:

Seems like a weenie spot, was not really aware of it until now. 

They often get upslope snow on the west side there that can be pretty decent too.  That whole area is very snowy just very few people around to report it.  I had a friend living at 1900ft in Stannard and he always had more snow on the ground than the Stowe base area. It’s just in the middle of nowhere where though.

[mreaves]

2 hours ago, NW_of_GYX said:

Just drove back to Maine from the smuggs area The most snow on the ground by far was between Hardwick and Danville, Vermont. What’s up with that zone? A little bit of elevation?

Walden is definitely a weenie spot. Great snowmobiling area. The pictures below are from the last couple of years. 

[NW_of_GYX]

1 hour ago, mreaves said:

Walden is definitely a weenie spot. Great snowmobiling area.

That was the only location I saw folks on sleds riding trails the whole trip.
 

Love driving across NNH, NVT to get to smuggs/Jay from western Maine in deep winter, through Crawford notch, across the CT River, then over to the northern greens- just a great, scenic winter drive every time. 

[Ginx snewx]

Great day to ski in Maine 

[powderfreak]

34 minutes ago, Ginx snewx said:

Great day to ski in Maine 

4” new and snowing hard at 6am here.

 

[das]

3.1" Monday night here in Charlotte and 3.2" last night.  On an off flurries and light snow today.  Nice winter day.

[radarman]

Snowy up there in NNE

[dendrite]

Love the caked look.

[Boston Bulldog]

The cold trend continues at 0Z tonight for Saturday night. Net gainer for NNE at this point thanks to the emerging front ender. Don’t look at the cracked out NAM coastal run however, that seems like too much to ask for

[J.Spin]

 

Bolton Valley was reporting another 3-5” of snow in their morning report, and 10” in the last 48 hours, so I figured it was time to head back up to the hill to see how much progress there had been in the ski conditions. The first thing I noticed when I reached the Village was how incredibly warm temperatures in the mid to upper-20s F felt – it was so warm that it seemed like the snow should be melting.

I started off with a ski tour on the Wilderness Uphill Route to the Wilderness Summit. Being a Wednesday, they were running the Timberline Quad instead of the Wilderness Chair, and that meant skier traffic on Wilderness was quite low. Conditions have improved quite a bit since I was last out on the mountain six days ago. Low-angle terrain has seen a full resurfacing, so unless the terrain had been recently groomed, you were not contacting any of the underlying hard surfaces. You could actually get bottomless skiing on any pitch of terrain if it hadn’t seen skier traffic, but that was quickly lost anywhere that had seen many skiers, so we’re not talking about a limitless resurfacing of all terrain.

The skiing was so good that I decided to stay around for some lift-served skiing as well. On my first ride up the Vista Quad Chair I rode with Will, another Bolton Valley regular. We wound up both skiing Cobrass, and after he told me about an adventure he’d had that brough him down the back side of the resort and required skinning back out, I showed him some of the terrain around Maria’s so that he had a good sense of how far you could go without ending up on the east side of the range.

I continued on down to Timberline, since it was my first chance this season to get in some lift-served skiing there. Not everything on Timberline is open quite yet, but skier traffic has been much lower there and fresh snow abounds. The off piste terrain in the 1,500’ - 2,000’ elevation range needs just a bit of additional base to be ready for prime time, but as with the main mountain, from ~2,000’ and above there’s plenty of snow for off piste adventures.

This most recent storm put down some fairly dense snow, and that played a big part in stepping up the conditions. My liquid analysis from the storm so far have indicated that the snow has come in right around 10% H2O. The off piste conditions out there right now are generally quite good, but there’s plenty of variability with respect to elevation, aspect, wind, and the predominant types of trees. Some areas are simply fantastic with mid-weight powder available, while others have a crust buried between layers of powder, and there’s some upside-down snow spots. Wide skis are a good choice to smooth out some of those irregularities.

There was definitely deeper powder with elevation, and here’s what I generally observed for powder depths out there today:

1,500’: 5-7”

2,000’: 5-7”

2,500’: 9-10”

3,000’: 12-24”

There certainly wasn’t two feet of powder everywhere up around 3,000’ or so, but in places that had not been skied or scoured, a foot plus was the norm. I did find some areas with up to two feet of powder atop the old base however, so some spots have picked up quite a bit over the past week.

[J.Spin]

15 hours ago, Boston Bulldog said:

The cold trend continues at 0Z tonight for Saturday night. Net gainer for NNE at this point thanks to the emerging front ender. Don’t look at the cracked out NAM coastal run however, that seems like too much to ask for

Since it looks like temperatures will go above freezing with this next system, I cored the snowpack for liquid here at our site in the valley for this morning’s CoCoRaHS report. Our snowpack currently contains 2.42” of liquid, which is the highest I’ve recorded so far this season. We’ve really only had a couple of notably warm storms, since maybe all the way back to some point in November? And those events either minimally degraded the snowpack here or resulted in a net gain in snowpack liquid equivalent. And with the deep snowpack in the mountains, they easily just incorporated any of that liquid for a net gain. We saw how much liquid was in the Mansfield snowpack from PF’s report a few weeks ago (12 to 14 inches), so it’s got to be even more than that now. It should be interesting to see how things go with this next system based on the most recent modeling.

[mreaves]

15 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

And those events either minimally degraded the snowpack here

I was in Waterbury for the December 19th storm.  I was sitting in a conference room at the State Office Complex and the wind was so strong it was pushing water into the room around the window seals.  I would not call that "minimal damage" to the snow pack. Outside the mountains, it pretty much set us back to bare ground.

[backedgeapproaching]

7 minutes ago, mreaves said:

I was in Waterbury for the December 19th storm.  I was sitting in a conference room at the State Office Complex and the wind was so strong it was pushing water into the room around the window seals.  I would not call that "minimal damage" to the snow pack. Outside the mountains, it pretty much set us back to bare ground.

Yea, if you look at Cocorahs from Dec 21st the vast majority of sites had snow depths under 3" with most being 0, T, 1", 2" after the cutter. 

Montgomery went from 27" to 3" in a few days. Guessing that was mostly upslope fluff.  I think as Jspin mentioned- Bolton, Stowe etc with higher El and more liquid in the pack probably held on better than most house sites which is not surprising. 

 

[bwt3650]

That’s a snowy week ahead for NNE as modeled with some major upslope in there early in the week if it pans out. Would set the resorts up real well for MLK.


.

[bwt3650]

The cold trend continues at 0Z tonight for Saturday night. Net gainer for NNE at this point thanks to the emerging front ender. Don’t look at the cracked out NAM coastal run however, that seems like too much to ask for

Even 35 and rain on sat isn’t a pack destroyer and if we get the surface back Monday, I’d sign up in a heartbeat to get the Rainer/thaw out of the way.


.

[J.Spin]

6 hours ago, mreaves said:

I was in Waterbury for the December 19th storm.  I was sitting in a conference room at the State Office Complex and the wind was so strong it was pushing water into the room around the window seals.  I would not call that "minimal damage" to the snow pack. Outside the mountains, it pretty much set us back to bare ground.

 

5 hours ago, backedgeapproaching said:

Yea, if you look at Cocorahs from Dec 21st the vast majority of sites had snow depths under 3" with most being 0, T, 1", 2" after the cutter. 

Montgomery went from 27" to 3" in a few days. Guessing that was mostly upslope fluff.  I think as Jspin mentioned- Bolton, Stowe etc with higher El and more liquid in the pack probably held on better than most house sites which is not surprising. 

That’s interesting, because it clearly shows that there was quite some variability in the effects from that storm, even within the same town. I was actually referring specifically to our observations site when I wrote “minimally degraded the snowpack here or resulted in a net gain in snowpack liquid equivalent.”. So the focus was our site and the mountains; I didn’t mean to imply “here” in the more regional sense. I cored the snowpack before the storm on December 15^th and there was 1.26” of liquid in it, and then I cored it again after the storm on December 20^th and there was 0.70” of liquid in it. So, we lost about ½” of liquid from the snowpack over the course of the storm, which I felt was fairly minimal relative to the event as a whole (the totals for the storm were 0.91” of liquid equivalent and 0.5” of snow). There’s definitely some room for debate about just how minimal/moderate one considers that, but if that’s what happened at our site in the valley, then the mountains must have incorporated all that liquid and hardly missed a beat. The other warm event I was considering in that post (Winter Storm Ezra) was later in the month, and it brought 1.24” of liquid equivalent and 3.2” of snow. In association with that event, the snowpack at our site went from 1.63” of liquid on the 28^th to 1.93” of liquid on the 30^th. Aside from the snow “quality” issue after that storm, that seems quantitatively like a gain for the snowpack at our site in the valley, and if that’s what happened down at our site, the mountain snowpack should have had the capacity to just gobble up everything that storm had to offer (which should have been 1 to 2 inches of liquid equivalent). When we’re talking the 12-14” of liquid that PF measured in the higher elevation snowpack, I’d think both of those events would have minimal effects.