Hope-ium

It’s looking a bit more optimistic for the potential start of ski season at Alpine Meadows on November 22nd. We had 3/32 of an inch of snow at my house last night and it looks like Alpine Meadows picked up somewhere between 2-5 inches of snow overnight. More importantly, the overnight lows should drop enough to allow snowmaking teams to get back to work…and we finally are tracking at least one storm in the forecast, one that offers enough potential oomph to kick the season into gear.

Here’s one run of the GFS, cherry picked from a bunch of them, that shows the storm as it could look somewhere around the 17th or 18th timeframe. The storm has been teasing us for the last six days out in the “Fantasy Land” part of the models between days 10 to 16. The fact that this storm is still in the models at 10 days out is significant. Frequent readers know that I call that range from 6 to 10 days out the “Realm of Possibility”. It could disappear. Over the last six runs, the total snowfall from the storm has ranged from around 12 inches up to 60 inches. The run below, from this afternoon, shows about 36 inches of snow possible.

We will need to keep an eye on this thing and see if it’s still hanging in the forecast at 5 days out, where it begins to look like something we can kind of count on. I wouldn’t book a vacation reservation on what us weather nerds are dreaming about just yet. The teleconnections have not bought into a complete pattern change just yet. Looking at the 8 to 14 day trends, it does show both colder and wetter during that period, both good things. That outlook is mostly being driven by that one storm mentioned above. The best chance of “wetter” is along the coast, which makes you consider that this one could slip down the coast and have less of an impact on the Sierra. We saw that happen early last season too.

It’s nice to have the mountains white again and turn our thoughts to skiing. The increased wetness and cold this week has put a kibosh on the biking for now.  But…Mammoth and Mount Rose are opening some terrain just three days from now, on November 10th. Terrain will absolutely be limited. Mammoth will announce tomorrow what terrain will open, but odds are it will be a WROD on Broadway and possibly the Saddle from Chair 3. Mount Rose plans to run the new Lakeview chair with access to Kit Carson Bowl and the Ponderosa run. That’s pretty darn close to top to bottom. I am guessing I will need to spend some money at Mount Rose next week once the crowds settle a bit. Mammoth on opening weekend…never.