The seasons are a changing’ quickly. We’ve been seeing freezing overnight temperatures for a week now, and the weather models are hinting at a consistent pattern of Gulf of Alaska based storms moving in as we get toward next weekend. I’ve already winterized our camper van and our sprinkler system will get shut down tomorrow.
Fortunately there’s nothing serious in the forecast just yet, as most of those systems will be staying to the north, just brushing us with a chance of showers now and then with snow levels running right about mid-mountain. This time of year, it’s really tough to pin down timing or amounts of anything. October is the time where where the atmosphere is volatile, bringing Indian summer (can we say that now?) one day and a hint of winter the next.
This time of year, I would normally be cheering on those early cold systems that allow mountains to consider blowing snow, leading eventually to openings of the Wizard at Mount Rose, the Castle Peak chair at Boreal, and eventually, the Roo at Alpine Meadows. This year is not the same. In case you forgot, there is some major construction going on at Alpine Meadows. Not only are they building the Alpine Meadows base for the new shiny box thing next to TLC, they are also completely reshaping the area in front of the lodge and rebuilding the breezeway. Unfortunately those projects are far from finished.
As you can see from the webcam shot above and the photo gallery below, there’s way more to the project than just pushing dirt around and building some stairs. We’re not privy to the exact details of what things will look like when it’s done. But we can see that it’s not really close to done yet. We’re right around 7 weeks from when we would like to see Alpine Meadows open. If I had to take a guess, it’s most likely we’ll be starting our seasons at Olympic Valley. I would love to be proven wrong. Keeping big snowstorms out of the forecast for a bit longer will help to make that happen. Hopefully we’ll see just enough to dampen fire danger, without turning the construction zone into a mud wrestling pit.
Who else is ready to just go skiing?
You should survey the other side to see issues there. Not sure what the plan is for base area for red dog lift.
Also lots of ski team meeting area between red dog and Expedition seems to be going away.
Any map of end product ?
I’ve heard it looks very tight there. Ultimately, I thought the plan was to move Red Dog further uphill and I guess that has not happened.
Good review Mark. Didn’t see a link to the slideshow! Good picture from Alpine’s webcam.
Hi Warren! You should be seeing the little slideshow right below the sentence “Who else is ready to just go skiing?” I’ve checked it in Safari, Chrome and Firefox and it works in all places, as well as my phone.