Another Storm, Another Disappointment

If you go to today’s official ski report, you may think that Alpine Meadows was completely skunked as it reports o” of new snow. But a quick study of neighboring resorts suggests that everyone got 2-3 inches last night. Here’s the revised forecast:

Poor BA is likely to get the smack down over his forecast again. But the signs were all there for more snow as the storm shifted west yesterday. It looked like it was going to be able to pick up a bit more moisture from the Pacific. But when I looked at the radar at 10 pm, I was pretty sure we were duped again. With a track straight down the Cascades and Sierra, there was little rain falling in the Sacramento valley and therefore little energy for orographic lifting and potentially heavier snowfall amounts. Luckily, the general attitude on the hill was one of acceptance today.

There were a couple of areas of small amounts of powder over groomers that were okay today. Early in the morning, Werners offered some pretty smooth turns with a fairly predictable surface, as did the terrain park. Unfortunately, the grooming department is clearly in limited operations at this time of the season, with fewer runs being groomed, with fewer passes and less clean up work being done. That’s on top of the difficulty of doing any grooming at all when the snow has turned to afternoon slop. There were a number of death cookies, curbs and ruts to be found lurking under the thin powder. The absolutely best groomer of the day was Kangaroo. Unfortunately, with the Kangaroo chair not running, it took a lot of miserable effort to get there.

Heading higher up the hill on Summit in search of real powder was like an arctic expedition today. You could stand at the top of Wolverine and point skis straight downhill and not move at all. it was that windy. Finding powder today required finding south facing lee slopes or lines protected by trees or rocks. We found some nice turns in Secret Spot, in the trees leading to Alpine Bowl Chair and along the extreme left edge of Lower Idiots. The deepest snow of the day was found in the runout of Sherwood Cliffs…but getting there..well yes, it did remind me of Ice Station Zebra (thanks for planting that seed in my head Brian).

Things are supposed to dramatically warm up this week…hopefully we will get the overnight freezes required to get good corn by the weekend as it is back to work for me this week. Hopefully some people will get to enjoy the last week of midweek ops at Alpine.