Fun But Frigid

It’s been quite a week at Alpine Meadows. It seems like we have had storm day after storm day in these first 7 days of February. That continued today, and although not much new snow actually fell overnight or during the day, the wind machine kicked into high gear and kept redistributing those fresh flakes. So I wouldn’t totally call it a powder day; it was more of a great storm day with soft turns aplenty.

How cold was it? The mountain temperatures ranged from 20° to 24° today. Combine that with windspeeds of 20 to 55 mph and you get some very cold windchills, as cold as –3°. Not only was that wind depositing snow around the mountain, it also deposited in any open area of your ski kit today. When I went in for my first warmup just before 11am, I found snow packed under my ear flaps and in my ears. I also found snow in just about every pocket that was not fully secured. Needless to say, I was much more careful for Round 2, adding heat packs to my gloves, a buff and triple checking every zipper. You would think I would have this down on day 75 of the season, but give me a break, we were riding bikes like it was spring time just 10 days ago.

I toured most areas of the mountain today, with the exception of Summit. I am certain it was awesome, and several friends said it was. I was skiing solo much of the day, and with visibility very poor at times, I played it conservatively. There were two tricks to having a great day on this very cold day. The first was to figure out where the snow was blowing to, and avoid those places it was blowing from. The second was to choose the lines that required a lot of turns, rather than rallying fast runs down groomed slopes. My favorite jam of the day was Sunday School (aka Gods Knob) to Rolls and Knolls to Gunner’s Knob. You could vary your route on each lap just a bit and get fresh turns every time. It also kept me out of the worst of the wind.

I did spin a lap on both Sherwood and Scott hoping to see more progress being made on the Lakeview Chair. Andy and I both noticed a cat working on the loading platform yesterday afternoon. There wasn’t much of an opportunity to see Lakeview from a distance today. A closer look from the Mountain View run told me that the summer wraps are still on the chairs, so there’s a job that needs to be done. I also spied a patroller bringing a load of tower pads to the top of Lakeview at midday. So we know they are headed in the right direction. Whether Lakeview would open on Friday or Saturday is still a question that has not been answered. Past practice is that the marketing department likes to announce openings on Fridays. We shall see.

Parking Pandemonium

The parking pandemonium each Tuesday continues to increase with passing week. It was all fun and games and no problem until the snow actually started falling and suddenly everybody wants to ski and ride. Now each Tuesday, half of Northern California and Nevada puts life on pause at 12pm and again at 7pm. Then we spend somewhere between a few and a few dozen minutes screaming at our devices and cursing every internet engineer that works for Palisades Tahoe and Honk. I told you back in October that the system is totally a kludge, and now that money saved by kludging a system together is the bane of our existence.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on social channels about how the poorly designed the system affects us all. A number of people suggest that it just bots reserving all of the spaces for resale. But a quick tour of Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in Northern California markets reveal no reservations for sale. There are safeguards in place that make that difficult. License plates cannot be registered on more than one account, so you can’t just insert my plate on your reservation.

Obviously, there needed to be a dedicated app developed that makes the process work smoothly, talking to just one server. It’s all of those redirects that completely bog things down. Honk handles parking for several ski areas now, and they seemingly all take reservations on Tuesdays. This makes you wonder about Honk’s total bandwidth availability. The bigger thing here is that it almost seems like this is a system that was designed to fail. Will we be hearing next season that paid reservations for everybody is the only way to reduce the demand?

Imagine what it will be like next Tuesday, which will now be known as “Super Tuesday”. It’s not that it follows Super bowl weekend. It’s the date that tens of thousands, or more, will be competing in the lottery for 9 consecutive days of reserved parking. Back when we did this in December, there was about 9% of the mountain open on mostly manmade snow, so demand was low. if you thought you were frustrated this week!

It’s been suggested that the only way to effect change is for more people to be the squeaky wheel. It’s not enough for just a few internet bloggers and Reddit radicals to post about the parking issue. You should make your voice heard. Yes, you should make comments here, as posting those publicly gives other people permission to speak up. But to really effect change, you should email info@palisadestahoe.com. I would love to give you a more specific address to send an email, but that is not our place to give that information. If only one or two people email that account, it will be easy to ignore. But if hundreds, or thousands, of people email that account, it’s a movement. Suddenly, Alice’s Restaurant is playing in my head.

We Are Approaching The Halfway Point

It’s day 75 of the Alpine Meadows season, and just doing some rough calculations in my head, we are likely approaching the halfway mark of this ski season. While nobody knows exactly when this ski season will end, you can bet that some bean counter in Denver already has potential dates marked on their calendar. Seventy five days from today is April 22nd, and we have seen closing days that early before in lower snow years…and in some not so low snow years. Still I do love skiing in May.

So how are we doing for snowfall this season? Here’s the stat recap, specifically for Alpine Meadows:

Month	53 Year Average Snowfall (in)	This Season Snowfall	Percent of Average
November	34.2	2.5	7%
December	70.4	24.0	34%
January	71.7	60	84%
February (to date)	76.3	39	51%
Season To Date (through Jan)	176.2	86.5	49%

So yeah, not a stellar season yet. The interesting thing is that if you look at total water content, that season to date number is 75%. Yes we had a lot more clear snow this season that we would like. So when I hypothesize that we could be halfway through the season, that’s based on a snowpack that is looking much better, but it is still fairly meager.

Could we get some relief? Will this totally change to a super snowy season? In the immediate future that would be a “no”. Once this storm finishes on Thursday, we drop back into a dry slot. The next storm out on the GEFS ensembles is around the 19th, and ten days out is not something you can count on. Even that one looks like another weak hitter. One good rule of thumb is unless you can identify forces that might lead to a major pattern change, then you should expect that current patterns will remain, with minor deviations.

People always want to talk about the “Miracle March” or that “Awesome April”, but the odds of seeing that happen are somewhat low. In that 53 years of Alpine Meadows weather history, there have been only 4 years where there was a statistically significant March Miracle during a low snow year, with 2018-19 being the most recent. Looking for “Awesome April” events, there have been two in the Alpine Meadows weather history. Still it could happen. For now, I will continue to ski every day I can, even if I must subject myself to the soul crushing race for reservations each Tuesday. See you out there tomorrow!