Apparently The Supply Chain Issues Affecting Our Weather Have Been Resolved

There’s quite a bit to unpack here today so stick with it! It’s April 13th, but it felt a lot more like January 13th today at Alpine Meadows. Temperatures never exceeded the mid 20’s except at the base area, and the ridge winds blowing 40-50 mph brought on an extreme chill. For all practical purposes, that meant that the bottom half of mountain probably skied better for most people today.

Off the top, there were few options for groomed slopes – just a small part of Alpine Bowl, Terry’s and Wolverine. Conditions in ungroomed terrain were extremely variable. Sunspot and Tower 19 were in the not so good category. Palisades and North Peril were in the okay but not fantastic category. The main problem was leftover frozen chunder from yesterday and icy bumps rearing their ugly heads.

Somewhere around 10, we moved to Roundhouse, as did many others. That gave more options for groomed terrain and some reasonably good ungroomed today. I enjoyed taking the sneaker lines along Red Ridge and Ladies Slalom a couple of times, now that most of the rocks have been re-exposed by the unknowing yesterday. My run of the day was actually Yellow, where the petite bumps were super fun, until they got scraped back to ice.

From much farther north, I got a couple of pictures from Andrew P, who is currently helicopter skiing with Andy in British Columbia. I am not sure which company they are flying with, but it looks like they are having fun after weather delays the first day.

Later in the day at Alpine Meadows, the winds were picking up and the sky turning more gray in advance of the next system. I bugged out a bit early, intending to take a siesta.

Instead, I took a deep dive into the weather models, after reading Daniel Swain’s latest post over at WeatherWest. His post covered what is indeed a remarkable pattern shift, after a very dry spell from January through March. The next 7-10 days continue to bring more storms into Northern California. That blocking ridge that has been sitting out in the Pacific for 3 months was finally nudged to the east by super typhoon Malakas out in the Western Pacific. It’s now pumping energy and moisture right into the Pacific Northwest. Tahoe is at the southern edge of this train of storms. Swain has named this event the April Amelioration.

Historically, in 50 years of Alpine Meadows history, it’s only happened two times where we have seen a wet April after a dry JFM winter core. It happened in 2002-2003 and again in 2014-15. So this has the potential to be a big deal. Or it might just totally bust.

The point forecast for Alpine Meadows looks pretty disappointing. It’s currently showing 2 to 4 inches of snow for Thursday at mid-mountain and 1-2 for Saturday. But the last 4 runs of the GFS are headed into crazy town…really crazy. Here’s what they are showing:

Yeah, crazy, huh? A model run is not a forecast. What’s important to see is the consistent trend toward something bigger. You also can’t put all of your hopes into just one model either. So then I spent a bunch of time looking at the Canadian, Euro and NAM as well. All of the models are trending the next two storms upwards…but the amounts are about 1/2 the amount of the cray cray GFS runs. Still that is a significant amount. And there’s two more storms in the pipeline next week…

This explains why I never got my afternoon siesta.

A lot of the variability has to do with the snow levels. Remember how we’re on the southern edge of this thing? That means we don’t get as cold as we like and snow levels look to run from 5000 to 7000 feet. That could radically affect what falls at the ski area level.

An “employee only” ski day has been announced for Monday, April 18th. That’s a strong sign that Sunday, April 17th is the end of the season for those of us that are not employees…at least at Alpine Meadows. Would things change if we actually saw 2-4 feet of snow over the next 4 days? …insert sad trombone here…

Today’s title courtesy of Shecky