NNE Cold Season Thread 2025-2026

[powderfreak]

14 hours ago, qg_omega said:

Week late on an historically cold winter is a bit odd

 

That is weird.  Lake Erie by contrast has the most ice in late January in like three decades and is almost fully covered.

Wonder if the persistent NW flow causes a lot of wind there and water movement at Lake George?

[J.Spin]

Since we’re right around the midpoint of the snowfall season around here, I did a quick check on where the Vermont ski areas stand for season snowfall thus far, and the north to south listing of totals is below. The four resorts along the spine of the Northern Greens are all reporting 200-300”+ for the season so far. It would naturally be difficult to keep up that same snowfall pace for the entire second half of the season, but that would certainly result in some solid overall snow numbers. As is typical, the numbers drop off a bit to <200” for the ski areas in the Central Greens, and some areas are even <100” in the Southern Greens. These numbers are all subsequent to the strong boost from Winter Storm Fern last weekend, so some of those snowfall numbers in the south must have been quite low prior to that. A quick look at the season snowfall totals thus far for the Vermont CoCoRaHS sites shows that several of them have seen more snow than any of the resorts in the Southern Greens - and CoCoRaHS sites are generally going to be valley/non-mountain locations. That disparity may be a function of the season thus far being characterized by more progressive/northern jet stream patterns vs. coastal or southern jet stream events.

Jay Peak: 309”

Burke: 118”

Smuggler’s Notch: 218”

Stowe: 218”

Bolton Valley: 222”

Mad River Glen: 138”

Sugarbush: 154”

Saskadena Six: 50”

Pico: 140”

Killington: 140”

Okemo: 84”

Bromley: 117”

Magic Mountain: 73”

Stratton: 106”

Mount Snow: 88”

[J.Spin]

We had another cold January Saturday on our hands today, but temperatures were certainly up a notch from what we encountered last weekend. Instead of valley temperatures hovering around 0 F for highs, they were up around 10 F today, so I headed up to the mountain for a ski tour. The temperature was still only around 0 F when I arrived in the Bolton Valley Village around midday, and it was busy, but not “holiday weekend” type of busy, and I was able to get a parking spot right in the backcountry access lot.

Thanks to Winter Storm Fern and the subsequent systems that have come through the area, we’ve had over two feet of new snow in the valley over the past week, and the Bolton Valley snow report was indicating 30 inches of snow at the resort in the past 7 days. The powder is still deep and plentiful, but the powder quality certainly isn’t up where it was right after Winter Storm Fern. That storm cycle concluded with a period of incredibly dry 1-3% H2O powder; that champagne was so incredibly light and dry that it skied like a dream on any sort of pitch. Powder of that airy nature would naturally settle rapidly on its own, and it’s easily been crushed by the snows of these more recent storms. The powder from this week’s smaller systems certainly wasn’t too dense, with snow densities in the 2-7% H2O range, but the tail end of our most recent one did finish off with some fine-grained flakes that came around 10% H2O. In combination with the powder settling on its own and under the new snow, I even encountered some areas of wind slab out there on my tour. All told, the combination of depth and density in the powder out there today couldn’t support good turns on low-angle terrain, so you had to hit mid-angle terrain or steeper.

I toured up and around the Bryant Cabin today at elevations in the 2,000’ to 2,800’ range and settled powder depths were typically 14-15” on the low end, and 21-25” on the high end. So, I may be dissecting the finer points of the snow density, but there’s absolutely some fantastic powder out there. I initially descended through Gotham City and did a bit of exploring on new terrain, then I did another quick ascent to get a descent through Gotham in the Gun Sight area, which yielded some of the best turns of the day. There really hasn’t been a ton of traffic in many areas of the Nordic and Backcountry Network yet, so as long as you find those areas with appropriate pitches for the deep powder, you can get in some really nice turns.

The resort looked like it was actually getting a little busier when I was leaving in the early to mid-afternoon period – the sun was coming out and the temperatures were climbing a bit, so that was the little extra nudge that people might have needed to get out for a few runs.

[J.Spin]

January has just finished up and we’re at the approximate midpoint of the snowfall season around here, so I have the plot with the latest seasonal snowfall progression from our site. The current season is the red trace in the plot, and since that flurry of activity leading up to Christmas, snowfall strolled along at a roughly average pace until about the second week of January. The slope of the average snowfall trace can be used for comparison, but at that point the pace of snowfall actually fell off to a bit below average. This season definitely started to fall behind the snowfall pace of those comparator seasons I have in the plot, and that’s how it was going until that big snowfall spike near the end of January representing Winter Storm Fern. That storm and the couple of additional events we’ve had this week have brough this season right back up into the mix among those other seasons.

Starting with the numbers in hand at this point of the season, the stats can be used to get some odds of where the overall seasonal snowfall may end up:

Chance of reaching average season snowfall of ~160”: 96.0%

Chance of reaching season snowfall of 200”: 38.0%

Chance of matching the 1^st ½ season snowfall to reach 240”: 1.4%

Clearly it would be quite unlikely for this season to continue with the snowfall pace we’ve seen so far for this first half. We’ve never had a season reach 240” of snowfall during my period of record here – none of those other strong seasons in the plot reached that total.

I also have the storm list for the first half of the season below. I haven’t assembled stats on the pacing for the number of storm we get during the season, but we’re probably ahead of average there. If storm frequency were to continue at this pace, we’d have over 80 storms on the season, which is way above average – the greatest number of storms we’ve seen in a single season thus far at this site has been 64. If I were to run the numbers, I bet we’d find that there are fewer storms in the second half of the season relative to the first half. As we head father into the winter season, the tenor/typical weather pattern feels different than the November and December regime that has relatively warm Great Lakes and often provides lots of smaller systems/lake-effect events with frequent snowfall. But, every season is different, and we’ll see what Mother Nature decides to do this time around.

[tunafish]

On 1/31/2026 at 6:48 AM, powderfreak said:

That is weird.  Lake Erie by contrast has the most ice in late January in like three decades and is almost fully covered.

Wonder if the persistent NW flow causes a lot of wind there and water movement at Lake George?

Interesting.  I'd be curious to know how the latest warm season water temp ranked.  Was the starting point significantly higher this cold season, coming off the dry and sunny August/Sept?  If so, does that even matter (you'd think a persistent NW flow generates more mixing snd upwelling)?

[powderfreak]

24 minutes ago, tunafish said:

Interesting.  I'd be curious to know how the latest warm season water temp ranked.  Was the starting point significantly higher this cold season, coming off the dry and sunny August/Sept?  If so, does that even matter (you'd think a persistent NW flow generates more mixing snd upwelling)?

That’s a good point.  I’m not super familiar with Lake George but it’s weird it froze behind schedule, given most other lakes seemed ahead of normal or with larger than normal ice extent.  I do know that area is gusty and downslopes on NW flow off the southeastern Adirondacks… was just spitballing for ideas as to why it could be delayed.  A lot of wind would lead to more mixing and upwelling, and the water surface is rarely calm.