A Little Too Close For Comfort

First off let’s make this perfectly clear. If we say something negative on this blog about the ski and ride experience, it does not mean that we don’t totally appreciate the work done by the mountain ops team and ski patrol. We totally appreciate and respect every person that works on the mountain so we can slide down the hill on the boards of our choice. Today’s problem (and likely tomorrow’s) is more of a problem with how many passes have been sold and how the current season is being marketed. Today, Alpine Meadows and our neighbor to the north were overcrowded, making the on the hill experience “too close for comfort.”

You would not know it when you saw the pretty pictures of new snow on the social channels last week. You wouldn’t have guessed it because you had no problem making a parking reservation on Tuesday. When you drove in to the parking lot, it was less than 50% full. The locker rooms and lodge were similarly uncrowded. It wasn’t until you have been out on the slopes a few runs that suddenly everything is “too close for comfort.”

My goal is this never-ending “pre-season” is to get in 12 to 15 runs each day. Today I made it to 6 runs. On that sixth run, I probably had six close calls: some World Cup wannabe proving how cool they are by straight-lining Upper Weasel; or a beginning skier suddenly turning their wedge turn into a full width traverse of the Weasel Headwall. It doesn’t matter how good of a skier or boarder you are, as your safety is really dictated by the worst skier or boarder sharing the slope with you. I do want to ski every day that I can, but today was a day to say enough is enough, and I will try again tomorrow.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we have done this all before. The years really are blending together, but a decade or so ago we were still skiing WROD during the winter holidays. My brain told me last week “we have done this before and we will be able to do it again.” But I forgot that there have been three major changes since our last big early season drought:

• The Hot Wheels chair is no longer the second slowest triple in Lake Tahoe. The new Treeline Cirque chair (aka Hotter Wheels is a faster quad chair. The old chair had a rated capacity of 1800 riders per hour, the new one 2400 riders per hour.
• The Ikon pass became a thing in 2018. Back during that last big dry spell, NAW Valley and Alpine Meadows had already been merged by KSL Capital but sold far fewer passes. With the advent of the Ikon pass, estimates are that some where between four and eight times more season passes have been sold within the day trip area surrounding our mountains. Then there’s the long distance travelers that are just filling in their bingo cards with Ikon resorts…
• The B2B gondola also adds to the crowds now. It has the capability of bringing 1400 additional visitors an hour from NAW Valley. Over the last two days, wait times at Gold Coast were listed as “10-20 minutes”, while wait times at Roundhouse showed only “0-2 minutes.” There is no doubt which direction people were moving to avoid long lines. Why does that thing have to be so reliable this week?

It’s not the lift lines or the number of lifts that is the problem. The average Jerry looking at the Palisades Tahoe app only sees that Alpine Meadows has 4 chairlifts spinning, all with short wait times. It’s not clear to Jerry that only 6% of terrain is currently available. He won’t know that the slopes actually look like a can of sardines (except they are alive and wriggling all over inside that can). That’s not stated clearly on the map or the website. Liz Worgan actually does a decent job with that on the “official” operations blog. But casual visitors probably don’t subscribe to the blog, and you have to have the patience of a saint to locate it on the official website.

There’s a small amount of hope for terrain expansion at Alpine Meadows, just not soon enough. The temperatures and humidity finally dropped enough to allow some snowmaking, and it did resume on Red Trail and at Sandy’s Corner overnight. With the amount of damage done by rain last week, it’s probably going to take until mid next week before they want to open Red Trail.

Also, we noted that there is starting to be some grooming activity in Alpine Bowl, and that puts a smile on our face. But as it stands now, they could not run Summit and send even more people down Weasel One and Weasel. It’s already overloaded. The guess is that they will wait until Red Trail and the runouts are done before opening Summit. Oh man.

I mentioned that other lift the other day in a sly way…you know…the ABC lift that sat idle for so much of the season last year waiting for an electrical harness? What if they ran the Alpine Bowl Chair as soon as they could get it ready? It would give access to the upper mountain, without adding any traffic to the lower mountain. It actually would remove some of the traffic from the lower mountain. As an added bonus, being a scary fixed grip double chairlift, you could put up signage for “Experts Only” and Jerry might actually stay on the lower mountain. Hmmm…

Will It Or Won’t It?

Some of the usual suspects are already hyping the “possibility” of a storm mid-next week that is said to bring anywhere between 1 to 4 feet of snow. I would love to tell you that will happen, like it’s still winter of 22-23. But it is not. There is a storm out there, yes. But the underlying forces that move storms around in the Pacific are still very much the same as last week. As of this moment, that storm looks like “Yet Another Cutoff Low” or YACL™. We are now at 5 days out and in a normal year, that makes it believable. This year that range of probability is more like 2-3 days out.

Here’s an interesting GIF. This is the “500 mb Height Anomaly” and that is a good way to look at how high and low pressure systems are moving. Red is high pressure, blue is low pressure. Low pressure systems bring snow storms. You can see that we are currently under high pressure. Toward the end of the loop, a deep blue low pressure system approaches from the west, but it never really makes it past the coast before drifting north. That is not a productive snowmaker, not by far.

Here’s the total snowfall prediction through next Friday, using the GEFS ensemble run from this afternoon. It’s showing something like 6 inches of total snowfall next week. I could have cherry picked a run that shows something slightly more, but the afternoon run seemed fairly representative.

So here we are. It’s crowded based on the minimal amount of available terrain so far. I’m still going to go skiing every day and hope for the best. Someday something more will open. My apologies to anyone named Jerry. I just took a quick look and everybody named Jerry has unsubscribed from Unofficial Alpine. You can’t blame them. Hopefully the snowmakers will stay busy the next few days…and the marketing team will take at least a few weeks off.