The final weekend of the season is upon us for the 21-22 Tahoe ski season. I did venture out to the north side of Alpine Meadows (aka Olympic Valley) this morning to catch some last laps. I am figuring this weekend will be too busy if the weather is decent, or if the weather sucks, the skiing may not be so great.
In case you missed the memo, operations start at 8am these days and end at 2:30pm. The power hour is probably more in the 8:30 to 10:00 timeframe. Looking at the remote data site, the temps on the upper mountain only got to about 46 degrees overnight. I feel like the general consensus was that there wasn’t much of a freeze overnight. But, at ground level, it did freeze solid. The first few laps on Gold Coast were pretty firm, especially with a persistent cloud deck hanging over the sun.
By 9:30, the sun started peeking out from behind the clouds and it only took a lap or two for solar radiation to soften the snow. For the most part things were nice and corny. There were some locations where snow had been farmed to fill things in – and some of that “new snow” was just a bit more sticky. Are we glad they farmed that snow – of course, as operations this week relied on snow farming to keep some areas covered.
There was some disappointment for some in that skiing was limited to only Gold Coast and Shirley. Siberia was not on the schedule today. At the first casual glance, looking over at Siberia, I heard some grumbles about “it could have opened”. But looking at the webcams, it would have been quite a bit of work to get both the ridge and the base around Siberia covered. Also, taking a look at the usual groomed areas from Sibo, there are a lot of obstacles that made most of that grooming extremely difficult. Also, while people familiar with things might have fared well off piste, this weekend’s visitors are far more likely to be casual skiers out there for the novelty of skiing on Memorial Day. Jerry has a radar for finding trouble like lightly buried obstacles, creeks or the snowmaking pond.
The sun cups off piste continued to grow with nobody skiing the last 4 days. There was nothing off piste today that made me think the skiing was better than where the groomers had smoothed things out.
Weather Or Not…It Seems To Be Improving
As is typical, it would not be a Tahoe Memorial Day weekend without the threat of rain and snow. It seems to happen more often than not. Currently there is a zonal flow across the Pacific that will bring systems mostly to the Pacific Northwest and Rockies this weekend. We are right on the lower edge of those systems. It’s all a matter of the exact position of the jet stream. There were a few days this week where it looked pretty wet with a strong potential for thunder storms and temperatures peaking in the upper 30’s. Today things are looking a bit more promising.
As of this afternoon, there is a slight chance of showers Saturday night, and that is it. The forecast includes “mostly sunny” or “sunny” for Saturday, Sunday and Monday at this minute with highs in the upper 40’s. While that is not bikinis and speedos weather, it’s actually a good forecast for skiing and riding. Saturday is supposed to be quite windy, but not to the point where it should close critical lifts. Reading this forecast, it would be really tempting to get out there for another day or two of skiing.
The problem is there are a whole lot of other people out there seeing the same thing. Spring weekend days at OV with only Gold Coast and Shirley open generally means longer lift lines and slopes that are more crowded than I tolerate. After Monday…there’s one more week at Mammoth and then it’s Timberline season.