Keeping A Rose-y Perspective

It was “Two Fer” Tuesday at Mount Rose today, and that was enough to get me back on the mountain at Mount Rose. It also was enough to get Bobble out onto the mountain for the first time this season. How good are the conditions at Mount Rose? They are holding up very well, even after being open for 5 days and having all skier traffic consolidated onto one corridor. Thanks to Mount Rose’s high elevation, they have been able to make a bit more snow here and there over the last couple of days. That refreshed some of the skiing nicely today.

There was a pretty good crew of Alpine Meadows people out at Mount Rose this morning. Word on the street was that Travis Ganong was skiing there this morning, and I saw one blur heading down Kit Carson Bowl that looked like it might have been him. Otherwise, there were at least 9 other people I recognized, or that recognized me, all just wanting to get some turns in while we wait for our home mountain to open.

We noted today that there was a couple of inches of new snow made in Kit Carson Bowl overnight. That did not make much of a difference on the groomed run, which gets scraped down pretty quickly. It did make the ungroomed terrain to skier’s right more pleasant. There’s a mixture of small moguls and larger moguls in that zone. Those all skied super firm on Sunday. The new little bit of manmade snow took away the scratchiness. I did tag a couple of rocks in that area today. The good news is that most of the rocks around Mount Rose are mostly decomposed granite, which is much less damaging to ski bases than the volcanic and metamorphic rocks we have around Alpine.

The outlook for skiing at our home mountain is still looking a bit dismal, just about one week away from the announced opening day. The possibility of natural snowfall is still looking rather slim. Overnight temperatures at the base of Alpine Meadows were 41° last night. No snowmaking is happening at that temperature! That’s probably a good thing as the snowmaking team, and the rest of the mountain ops team, is likely still reeling from last week’s accident.

It’s probably worth reminding you here that there has been no commitment yet as to what terrain will be open, if it does open, on November 22nd. Right now, the only place that looks like it could be readied is SnoVentures over at Palisades. On the Alpine side, there is still an awful lot of construction type activity going on.

Based on current conditions and the current outlooks, I upgraded my day ticket at Mount Rose to an Off Peak Season Pass today. That gets you weekdays all season, plus most weekends outside of January and February. I’ve had some form of a season pass at Mount Rose for many of the last twenty years. This will maintain not only my sanity, but also the sanity of those that must live with me. As my wife said, “it’s cheaper than therapy.” There’s also that thing about tempting fate. Now that I dropped the money for a Mount Rose pass, it’s going to snow like crazy and keep me at Alpine Meadows.

So What Is The Current Prognosis For Snow….or Snowmaking

When I wrote my last post on Sunday. The chance for natural snowfall was just about gone, but the forecast for snowmaking looked like it had possibilities. Only half of that statement was true. You could make all of the snow you want overnight in Truckee. We had 22° at my house overnight. Up at Mount Rose, they could make some snow with overnight temperatures right around 29°, thanks to their high elevation. But Alpine Meadows is neither at a high elevation, nor at the bottom of a mountain valley, where cold air sinks. As I mentioned above, not much snow can be made at 41°.

Looking at the next 4 days, we get some very weak waves as cut off lows move down the coast. Most of the rainfall stays off the coast, as does the colder air. The daytime highs will be too warm for any significant accumulation of snow. Overnight lows will be near freezing, but with higher humidities, the snow making effort would not be very productive. Hopefully once this cutoff low moves on, we can get into a colder pattern.

I did some model hunting this afternoon. Most of the time, the only models I show around here are the GFS operative runs or the GEFS ensemble runs. While not every forecaster agrees, for our purposes, the GFS does a pretty good job on handling California weather. The output from the GFS and GEFS has been pretty poopy lately. So those of us that are really just wanting to see a chance of snowfall, we look so see what some of the other models say. Then we hope that one of those models are “more correct” for this time period.

So below, I present the GFS, the Euro, and the Canadian models showing total predicted snowfall through November 20th. The GFS is the least favorable, showing almost nothing for Tahoe during that time period. The Euro and the Canadian do show the potential for a foot or more of snowfall within that window. Both of them see a storm toward Sunday.

The most productive of the models is the ICON model (India), and it wants to bring in as much as 4 to 5 inches of rainfall/snowfall by the 22nd. That model is really an outlier at this time. From my experience the ICON model often is the outlier. I can’t show a picture of that model as I don’t have access to that. (I saw a screenshot shared elsewhere)

So the important thing is that there are some models that are showing some hope, even though the US based GFS model is not.

I encourage you to consider going skiing somewhere else for now, because your sanity is important to me too. Rose is fun and it looks like they should be able to open The Wizard sometime soon. Mammoth continues to offer skiing off of chairs 1, 3 and 6. Travel to Mammoth is still relatively easy. Boreal also plans to open this Friday. The last time I drove by last week, they had one side of the Castle Peak terrain park area pretty well covered. I did not see much coverage at the top yet. I do miss skiing at Alpine Meadows, but all skiing is fun.