The mantra continues. All skiing is good…until it isn’t. We had another overnight dose of snow at Alpine Meadows, making for some fresh tracks that offered fun skiing, as long as you were making first tracks. Then the temperature climbed a few degrees and that new snow started resembling new concrete. We’ve been stuck in this soggy pattern for about 6 days now…the cutoff low blues. Still, the skiing was fun and slowly the base is building. Someday, more of the mountain will open.
The huge bonus of the day was the lack of people at the mountain. That Monday morning feeling was awesome, as it meant there was an opportunity to hit each little stash of new snow more than one time. For yet another day, Summit was enshrouded in fog, and slightly delayed in opening. Instead we made our way to Scott, aiming for the new snow that fell on the previously groomed Ridge Run and Bobby’s. We were not the only people with this idea, and as the number of people increased, we worked our way left past Standard Run, eventually ending up at that short stretch of Mountain View that is currently available..
We also choose to take a few trips to the top of Hotter Wheels, mostly to check out all of the work that is currently going on in prepping Sherwood. Today that was none. Bummer. We are enjoying a few quieter mid-week days again, but we know that the weekend crowds will return, and having more room to spread out on the mountain is always an appropriate goal. It’s understood that everything from South Face and points south is likely still too risky to open…but something, anything is better than another overcrowded weekend on the slopes. I noted a couple of skiers struggling in Hidden Knolls…not quite enough new snow to erase the icy bumps beneath. Skiers taking the Expert Shortcut route seemed happier.
We had some good turns this morning in REDACTED, but this is all we can show:
Sometime around 10:45, the temperatures started warming, just like yesterday. Riding the center seat on the chair, it was a constant stream of drips from overhead. Those vents on top of your helmet can be closed to stop airflow, but when they fill with water…they are not water tight. Still we thought that a trip into the trees along the north edge of Hot Wheels Gully might be fun. They just opened that terrain yesterday and untracked snow was still visible. Ugh. It was heavier than concrete. There’s a cliff in that zone that people enjoy jumping off of when the pack is deeper. Today it had shed some “pinwheels”, except that the pinwheels were snowballs that turned into snow man sized snowballs at the bottom of the pitch. I regret not getting the photo. Yes, it was soggy!
More On The Way?
It looks like we might get a reprieve from the sogginess on Tuesday. Partly cloudy skies are expected with some sun, which will be a novelty. Any terrain that does not get groomed tonight will likely be a coral reef tomorrow morning. So hopefully we will see more grooming overnight that what has been typical…unless they are instead investing groomer hours in Sherwood prep.
Another similar cutoff low moves in for Wednesday into Thursday. As of today…another 6 to 12 inches of snow look possible, with snow levels looking again like 6-7K feet. Then one more soggy system is possible for Friday and Saturday. We get a drier slot into the weekend and beyond, still looking like warmer temps too. We don’t make the weather, we just report it.
Hey…Bobble pixelated in REDACTED…Finally, a good shot of me, though, I suppose, that could be my brain scan?
Sherwood…what the heck is the hold up?
Latest update, another 2 feet needed for Sherwood: https://blog.palisadestahoe.com/operations/operations-update-funitel-maintenance-snowfall-today/
Somehow I had a vague recollection of skiing Sherwood around New Years during the abysmal 2014-2015 winter. Searched and found confirmation from an old tweet that it opened December 27 of that year (search twitter er uh X: “Pacific Crest South Bowls (accessed by Sherwood) are opening tomorrow!” if you want the receipt). Looked at the NRCS Ward Creek SNOTEL data. 19″ snowpack when it opened that year. Current snowpack at the SNOTEL=38″
2 left feet?!?!
Lakeview needing another 2 to 3 feet, I’ll buy that. But Sherwood just needs groomer time…plenty of snow to farm to make that work.
Holding Kangaroo and ABC for weekends only is a bunch of bull pucky!
I’m a former Alpine Meadows skier and regular reader of Mark’s and Andy’s well-done posts, and all season I’ve been reading your tales of weather woe and hoping the snow levels would finally drop and lighter stuff start falling. Meanwhile, I left my winter home, where the midday temperature outside was 82 degrees, and headed to our second home in Flagstaff, AZ, and went skiing today for the first time this season at the local ski hill, and on brand new skis (Volkl M6 Mantra), no less!
The weather here is eerily similar here to what you report. In town, at elev. 7,000′, the temp has held resolutely in the 30s but above 32. Although Flagstaff — a city of 77,000 with a state university that adds a flood of students — receives nearly 100″ of snow annually on average, there are barely even any patches of snow around town, not your typical scene in late January. Now is the brief time of year when this region would receive anything resembling a dump of snow, but we’ve got nada. Since I arrived on Saturday there have been various snow flurries, but nothing sticking. Up at Arizona Snowbowl, whose base is about 600′ higher than the top of Summit at Alpine, the temps were much better – holding around 20-25 degrees. This is important, because unlike up your way, the base is all of 2′ and the season total a paltry 59″. At this latitude — a mere 60 miles north of Santa Barbara — some years the snow just doesn’t show up, and those cold temps help us keep what little we’ve got.
For all that, Snowbowl’s high elevation and just-right temperatures preserved snow quality today. Counterintuitively, the 18 of the small resort’s 55 runs that still are closed mostly are the black diamond runs up near the top. Today the groomed runs that had been skied past corduroy were great: A light coating of soft snow from the 2″ that fell overnight, just enough to create a nice, lightweight spray on the turns. That old term “packed powder” comes to mind. The sun played hide-and-seek with banks of fog that drifted in and out at different elevations, creating lightswitch-quick shifts from good to poor visibility. At one point, I got off Arizona Gondola chairlift at the top and skied *down* into a bank of fog that promptly destroyed visibility, and suddenly I was skiing at 30 mph by Braille. Down lower on a south-facing run called “Phoenix” I was treated to some sogginess, a kissing cousin of Sierra Cement, but a west-facing run even lower surprisingly offered some powder — a touch heavy, yes, but no Sierra Cement and actually pleasant.
As reported at Alpine today, Snowbowl’s slopes where lightly skied and the lines short, except for Arizona Gondola, which heads to the top and offers a 2-mile, 2000′ vertical run back down, which had a 10 to 15-min wait in part because they were allowing only 4 at a time on the 6-seat chairs and 6 in the hybrid lift’s 8-seat gondolas to reduce capacity, since much of the top of the mountain served by the lift is still closed. The lifties’ method basically worked. I did not experience the disturbing traffic jams with missile-speed skiers causing panic, as I’ve read about on Unofficial Alpine, and those skiers and riders who were going at rocket speed had space to do their thing without threatening the well-being and sanity of other skiers.
Interestingly, nearly everyone riding the lifts today was a local, whereas typically the majority, even during the week, are people who come up from the Phoenix area. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe news of the puny snowpack discourages Valley of the Sun residents from leaving their 75-degree weather and making the effort to get to the slopes. One local on told me the old adage at Snowbowl was that if you are not skiing on rock skis, the mountain will make them so. Sure enough, I decided to try an ungroomed mogul run, and while gamely dodging sticks and pine needless, I heard that undesirable scraping sound signaling that my new skis had met their first rock.
Meanwhile, the animated weather map on this post shows that our region might actually receive a meaningful amount of snow, but as Mark says, I’ll believe it when I ski it.
I think I wore out my Skigee today while skiing off of Summit chair. Another day of drizzle and lousy visibility at the top.