A change is afoot. We’re about to make that transition from early season mode to peak season mode. Some schools began their Christmas holiday at 3pm today. This is one of those weird Decembers where there’s a three week period of schools being out. While it was not busy at all first thing in the morning, it continued to build as the day went on. When we left at noon, Lot 4 was most of the way full, and a solid stream of cars was coming up Alpine Meadows Road.
Silly me, I just went to the Truckee Safeway on the way home from the dump. While the store itself was not gridlock, the roads on that end of town are packed with cars full of kids, Christmas presents and skis.
I was pretty excited for the opening of Lakeview today. One can not get enough of that particular lake view, and Lakeview offers some fun terrain that is a bit more removed from the hubbub. Unfortunately, we were skunked, as there was a mechanical issue with Lakeview before opening. I always prefer that they find those issues before I am on the chair! When I got the tweet that Lakeview was open around noon, the boots were off and I was writing my afternoon chore checklist.
Having Lakeview open means that 100% of the terrain is open at Alpine Meadows. That’s a good thing when you are heading into peak season. What’s not at 100% just yet is lift operations and grooming, where staff shortages still seem to be the ongoing norm. Yellow has not run since Summit came on line and neither has Kangaroo or ABC. Those chairs are important when it comes to having a place to survive the busiest days.
Also not at 100% is the grooming. We’re definitely not in powder day mode anymore. Just keeping tabs on what people are doing over the last two days, they are mostly skiing groomed runs, and there are not many right now. The ones that are groomed are fairly busy. That would include Dance Floor, the left side of Weasel, Sherwood Run and Alpine Bowl. Some of the groomed runs are pretty firm right now and not very attractive. Those would include Ridge, Bobby’s and Charity. People are definitely going to need some room to spread out in the coming weeks. I know over the last two weeks, some grooming time has been allotted to opening new terrain at Sherwood, Scott and Lakeview. Now that is done, hopefully we’ll see additional grooming in Wolverine, Sunspot, Werners, Kangaroo, Terry’s Return, and Howards Hollow. Occasional swipes at Red Ridge, Ladies Slalom and Yellow would be great too. That would still leave all sorts of moguls on the mountain for bump aficionados .
Off piste is still quite variable. In some areas it’s just not skied in enough, in other areas it’s chunky monkey. Additional ski traffic and warming temperatures may help resolve some of this over the next week. Some areas get too much traffic and have bigger moguls than your average skier during the holiday period wants to ski.
Weather Or Not?
In short…it’s looking dry through the remainder of 2022. Going over the last 10 model runs this afternoon, only a couple of them tried to bring in even a bit of snow. The majority of them did not. At least I was the down to earth weather geek that mentioned that there was a good possibility this was coming. Not every day can be a powder day. I am okay with that scenario. Here’s one of the later runs showing total snowfall over the next 16 days:
And here’s the PNA index, where positive is negative for those that want more storms:
Things could change, but right now there are no signals that will happen soon. You can enjoy skiing as it is or not. I chose to ski.
Christmas Shopping Ideas
Ski Patrol Pups has arrived in my mailbox! The book was created by Megan Butcher* and Megan Jost and tells the story of Alpine Meadows patrol dogs. The story is great and the watercolor illustrations are fantastic. It will make an awesome Christmas present for my youngest grand-nieces, who are both avid skiers at 3 and 5. You can order your own copies of Ski Patrol Pups at SkiPatrolPups.com. If you’re local, you can also find it at Word After Word Books in Truckee. A portion of the proceeds from the book will go to the Alpine Avalanche Rescue Foundation (AARF). *Megan Butcher is the spouse of Collin Butcher, Alpine Meadows ski patroller.
I also wanted to do another shout out for shopping locally at the Tahoe Sports Hub in Truckee. So far this season, we’ve bought a couple of pairs of skis and bindings, some ski poles and other miscellaneous things. Rob and his crew do an amazing job of knowing their products, making recommendations, and getting you set up for snow sports at this time of year, and summer sports during the summer months. It’s a drag having to drive somewhere else to buy stuff and having anything shipped here is darn near impossible these days. Shop locally, smile big.
Bar Mitzvah? Prepping for Hannukah?
So did they actually build the cabin storage building flipped? I don’t know how they could mess up that bad. Hopefully they didn’t.
The storage building is not “flipped”… the openings on the far side are for cabin removal and maintenance etc. They covered the opening for storage with siding for aesthetics this year. It will be about 20 feet or so to the left of the “human” door that is there now, and just beyond the framed yet unfinished shed roof that is there now. Behind the siding the large opening is all framed in. My question now (and some of the employees too) is why that shed roof being built right up next to the wall of the building…where’s the snow going to go?
They were holding a ‘soft opening’ for the B2B gondola today. The word was that employees were invited, but we showed up today and they said nope. I did enjoy the Alphorn group playing for the event. It was like they were there to cleanse the space of bad juju.