It was a mélange of weather today, and that trend will continue into the upcoming weekend. With the thoughts of powder skiing long behind us, I am dreaming of a return to the predictability of spring skiing. So waking up to some snowflakes and gray skies was not all that inspirational this morning. If it’s not going to be a significant snowstorm, then it may as well be sunny. Am I right? Okay, there is the argument that cloudy skies preserve winter snow, but that ship was sunk yesterday, as the sun cooked a lot of snow.
But by the time I reached the traffic light at Alpine Meadows Road, the snow was gone and blues skies were evident. For the second day in a row, most of the cars were turning in at Palisades Tahoe, as word is that the skiing is always better over there. Once again I focused on all of the fun terrain I have been missing off of the Summit chair. Between storm closures, poor visibility’s and wind holds I have not had enough of that lately.
One thing to note is that groomed snow was a rarity at the mountain again. Off of Summit it was just Alpine Bowl and much narrower than usual. Scott had only Ridge Run; Lakeview only had Mountain View and Sherwood had only the main Sherwood run groomed. Only TLC and Roundhouse offered multiple options. Who knows exactly why grooming was limited today. Maybe we are still supposed to believe the fantasy that “It’s deep!” and nobody wanted to ski on piste today. But the truth is that most people did want to ski groomed trails today, as the off piste snow was a lot more variable today. Some of them were frighteningly busy today.
The smooth windbuff we have enjoyed since Monday is no longer a thing. The north facing runs with soft winter snow are rapidly growing moguls. The sunnier aspects were somewhat stiff and crunchy in the morning. Then there were the threatening cumulus clouds moving in off the lake and dropping some graupel that kept most of Sherwood, Lakeview and Scott crispy today.
I did note that one snowcat was tasked today with rehabbing Kangaroo today, as you may have seen the five foot wind lip in Andy’s photo from yesterday. What you could not see was that the top of kangaroo was surrounded by a bowl of snow yesterday. With a race scheduled on Kangaroo this weekend, cat time was necessary to get the slope open again. No cat time was used yet to build a new access road to Wolverine Saddle. According to Mountain Manager Jeff Goldstone, that’s on the priority list for getting done before the upcoming very busy weekend, allowing crowds to more efficiently spread across the mountain. The ABC chair dig out is also on the list and hopefully will be done for the weekend. Goldstone did note that J1’s are already leaving, with most gone by the 15th, which will lead to staffing challenges in the lift department.
My run of the day was D7 to D8, followed by Sunspot once it had softened a bit. I wish I had spent more time there rather than just trying out everything. The worst run of the day was the ungroomed Robin Hood at Sherwood. That said, I never tried Lakeview or Scott as the empty runs and empty chairs seen from atop Shuttle Cornice told the story.
The GIF below shows the latest run of the GFS for 24 hour snowfall over the next week. There’s no big powder days in that forecast you might call it more “nuisance snow” at this time of the year. Fortunately the snow level outlook has improved over the last 48 hours, as for awhile the “R” word was being tossed around quite a bit for the weekend. Snow levels look to stay below 6500 feet.
In the longer run, yesterday the models tried to call for a deeper low to move in during the third week of March with the possibility of a bigger storm. Today, only about half of the ensemble members were seeing that possibility. Flippity flop.
Ikon Pass Prices Released
Ikon pass prices for next season were released today. I am making some quick notes here for today:
- Prices for the Ikon Pass rise $90, now costing $1249 ($1149 renewal price)
- Prices for the Ikon Base Pass rise $40, now costing $869 ($819 renewal price)
- Price for the Epic Pass for next season is $892 and the price differential from Ikon continues to grow
I need to take a much deeper dive into season passes, the over demand for skiing at Palisades/Alpine Meadows and the efficacy of parking reservations. I’m pretty sure my wife will move to the Base Pass. After this weekend, I may be ready for the Base Pass too…
Like you I crave days of endless corn snow.
Just fyi, the grooming at Palisades was excellent today.
Oh, and there was some great off piste on Headwall and KT.
I still like Alpine better :))
Year-over-year
* Ikon increased 7.7%
* Ikon Base pass increased 4.8%
* Epic pass prices across all versions increased 8%
We took the shiny boxes over to the other side and it was much better snow 🙂
As a regular reader of this blog, I’ve paid attention to the posts that discuss morning ice and afternoon softness on south-facing slopes vs north-facing slopes. Yesterday morning I skied at my “home” mountain in Arizona in mostly sunny conditions, and the moguls basically were ice sculptures (previously it must’ve gotten warm then frozen overnight). The groomed runs were the only sane place to be. Veering even a little off piste generated a loud scraping of ice and rough going for the skier. A vestige of a storm that went through SoCal yesterday visited Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks today, and this morning I was skiing though soft, powdery snow (a tiny bit heavy, but still quite pleasant) roughly 3-5″ deep in some places. We’ve missed out on the volume of snow you’ve gotten at your latitude. I was grateful for today’s dusting.
I am almost afraid to buy a pass of any kind. What keeps them from announcing even more restrictive paid parking and/or reservation hassles after they take our money (like they did this year).
^ This