Many people would have bet that this season would never make it to 150 days. If not due to a COVID shutdown, then possibly due to the exceptionally low natural snowfall. Honestly many people bet against this season, either not buying a pass, or deferring their pass into next season. Then there’s those of us that are too addicted to skiing and riding to take even a day off.
Yep, it was another fine day of skiing and riding at Alpine Meadows, albeit with a slightly shrinking area to ski. As we mentioned, Scott chair’s last day was yesterday. We noticed today that all of the hardware has been removed from the Teigel terrain park, leaving a jump or two and some roughly shaped knobs and lumps of snow to play on.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve enjoying the Scott terrain midday. Without that option today, and with the upper mountain getting a bit sloppy, I opted for some Roundhouse off piste fun. The snow softened perfectly on Sympathy Face and Rolls and Knolls for some playful runs with a little variety. Each run took me down a differing sequence of lines down the mountain and around rock outcrops and trees. Just as I decided to extend that on toward Gunner’s Knob, the off piste snow started getting a little grabby. I’ve got a new goal for tomorrow.
I was feeling pretty good about my adventures until Randy texted me a photo from his latest adventure up to Beaver Bowl. Since I turned down his invitation, he instead brought along Dot. I thought I really loved skiing, but I’m pretty sure these two have outdone me. Nice work!
There’s finally just a bit more clarity as to what the rest of the season looks like for Alpine Meadows. It seemed like nobody knew any answers, and those that professed to know the answers had conflicting stories. But just about 20 minutes ago, the tweet from SVAM led to the operations blog, which added a bit of clarity:
So the ending day is not yet known. It does appear that they are going to run Summit until the snow gives out. That does not say a word about “weekends only” so it appears that midweek operations will continue into next week and possibly beyond. Boy, that is a refreshing approach to mountain management. Just call this “the little season that could.”
The Sunday storm has been slightly downgraded. The afternoon run of the GFS is now calling for about one foot of snow, while the other models are calling for about 4-6 inches of snow. The wind forecast has also decreased. This is a trend I can live with. By tomorrow, that storm falls into some of the short range models, which tend to be a bit more accurate.
Weather Update
The short range NAM model now covers the Sunday storm and it looks pretty solid, with storm totals to 18″ at the crest and around 6-8″ at the base. The winds are forecast from 45 to 80 mph, which could affect Summit operations. Snow levels may drop as low as 4000′ feet, which is pretty low for this time of year. A post-skiing drive on Sunday night over the summit has the potential to be long. For all of these reasons, NOAA has issued a Winter Storm Warning…only a handful of those this entire season!
It’s being termed California’s fourth driest winter since records have been kept. That confused me. All four years of 2011 to 2015 were drier and also some other real clunkers. But the above assessment was for
the entire state. Tahoe may have been below average but it wasn’t that bad, certainly better than the rest of the state re. rain or snow.
Just looking through the Alpine stats…76-77, 85-85, 86-87, 13-14, 14-15 were drier years through the end of March. This Sunday storm may change standings a bit. The other thing is, a lot of our storms this year were inside sliders. That would explain Central Nevada being above average while the north coast and Sacramento Valley are way below average.
If you look just at water equivalent precipitation, we’re actually far behind any of the 2011-15 years. We’re running 40% behind 2014-15! http://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=PLOT_ESI.pdf
Crazy how little precip we’ve gotten and how much snow we’ve been able to squeeze out of that little bit of precip. It helps that we’ve had almost no rain this winter, and that most of the storms have had high snow levels with correspondingly high snow ratios. It’s definitely skied better than you’d expect from 65-70% of average snowfall, let alone from 40-45% of annual total precip.
Oh yes, by the 8 station index, things are really bad for NorCal, and that doesn’t include the North Coast area. What I mentioned as being the 5 drier years refers to the “official” Alpine Meadows snow and water content records over the last 50 years.