Thursday morning update: The Remote Data page is showing three inches of new snow at the base. Temperatures at the are rapidly climbing. It’s already 36° at the base and 33° at the top with winds gusting into the 60’s at Summit. As of 8:20, those temperatures appear to be holding steady…Summit on wind hold as is the upper mountain at Squaw.
Today was definitely the best day of the week for skiing and riding, if the forecasted snow levels are correct for the next two days. Temperatures were quite a bit warmer today, and wind was just about non-existent in the morning. The skies were also pretty clear and blue into the lunch hour today.
The groomed terrain was skiing fast and fun today. Although there were a number of snow guns firing on Rock Garden, DanceFloor and Weasel, they were a bit more spaced out today. It was pretty easy to make a game of avoiding the spray of ice pellets. The snow making, along with quite a bit of tilling, improved the ski surface dramatically over the last two days.
Snow makers have been so efficient that there were some pretty large whales formed in the midst of the trails. That led to a bit of pushing on the Trail Of Tears (Tiegel Flats). In other areas it just made for some fun bumps to get old man air.
I took a lap in Alpine Bowl just as the light was starting to get flat today. It’s the first lap I have made there since Sunday. Coverage there continues to deteriorate, with a lot of sticks and rocks showing, even on the main groomer. While the sun was out today, the better call from Summit was likely to traverse to Lower Idiots from D8. By the time most of us get back to Summit, we assume that coverage will have improved.
The forecast continues to be pretty fluid. Yes, there is a double entendre there. Snow levels are expected to rise above 8,000 feet by midday tomorrow and stay there through the end of the day Friday. It might be possible to catch some mini-pow turns in the morning before things get wetter over the next two days. For Saturday, the next wave of the storm may cool down and bring snow levels back to lake level, before another warmer storm moves in Sunday into Tuesday. That said, the forecast beyond Friday continues to change with each rendition of the forecast discussion.
So the question remains, will there be a net gain or loss of snowpack after this series of storms? Fortunately, the snowmaking team has worked very hard over the last two days to bolster the snow pack on the lower part of the mountain. We hope it works. For the upper mountain, we’ll just have to wait and see. For those of us that also have the Mount Rose pass, it should be an all snow event for them. We would expect they will have the entire mountain open by next week.
Watch that “there”/”their” problem, Mark! Priorities, man, priorities.
Two of them in a row! Thanks.
But he redeemed himself with this pun: “The forecast continues to be pretty fluid.”
It was really sad that nobody was catching that one!