It was too late to be a Festivus miracle and too early to be a Christmas miracle. But today was a miracle when it came to skiing at Alpine Meadows because skiing and riding went from nearly zero right back to hero with this Christmas eve storm. Of course you had to be a believer in miracles, or the weather forecasters that tried to convince you that snow levels would drop like a bomb with this storm. A lot of people were nonbelievers and they missed the best part of this powder day.
Photos above include shots from both Mark The Ski Bum and Unpossible1
I was woken this morning by the sounds of high winds and rain spattering on my windows. The temperature at the base of Alpine Meadows was 41° and rain drops showed on the webcam. But I did a quick check of the models and they showed temperatures crashing very quickly. By the time the lifts rolled, the temperature at the base was 29.5° and there was already couple of inches of new snow. Another part of that miracle was the winds, which dropped to the point where Summit rolled at 9am and there was good visibility at the top of the mountain. Some of my buddies went to Summit, while the rest of us focused on Weasel, then Yellow then Scott.
With so few people on the mountain and heavy snowfall continuing, it was a morning of first tracks all over the place. It definitely helps to know the mountain well. That allowed me to choose a lot of those lesser known lines that are not in sight of any chairlifts.It’s tough to say exactly how much snow fell. An informal parking lot measurement went fingertip to wrist, or about 8″. There’s places we skied that felt like a foot today and it’s not quite done yet. So it is “as forecast”.
Calm down now. It did get pretty busy in the afternoon as soon as people did figure out that yes, it really was snowing at the mountain. The cars were still coming up the road at 2pm and things were looking more typically busy in the base area. Figure that most of the mountain will be skied out tomorrow other than whatever snow falls after closing.
More Snow Thursday
Some naughty elves took away some of the snow we were seeing in the models yesterday. The morning runs are looking more like a foot instead of two feet…still fun.
The snow outlook for Thursday is improved. In my last report that storm looked warm and weak. But successive model runs have pumped up the precipitation numbers. The NAM for the last three runs has shown the potential for up to two feet of new snow.
Calm down. There is not great model agreement on that number yet. The models are kind of all over the place. Hopefully the snow levels stay down, as the trend is back up as we get more ridging toward the weekend.
It’s Super Tuesday II Today
It’s the second Super Tuesday of the season. Why is it super? It’s the time to make parking reservations not just for the coming weekend, but also for the following week through Friday. This was the first time the system seemed slow or laggy at noon today. I also ran into a glitch. You are limited to only holding 10 reservations at a time, so when I tried to reserve for Friday the 3rd, it let me know that I already had 10 reservations and could make no more. Looking back, it was still counting today’s reservation as one of my 10, even though that reservation was already “used”. I guess I will be making that last reservation later this evening.
Lifts Are In The News
There’s been a number of ski lift incidents in the news lately. This is something that you never want to hear about, especially if you are a guy like me that does somewhere around 3000 lift rides a season. Yesterday there was an incident at Heavenly Valley on the Comet Express. A grip on one carrier (chair) failed, allowing it to slip backwards down the cable into the chair behind it. Some people were thrown about 30 feet to the snow and one person was seriously injured on the rear chair. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
I bring this up now because we noted that Roundhouse was on a mechanical hold this morning, unexpectedly. My very unofficial guess is that with an abundance of caution, the grips were probably given a closer inspection today. The Comet Express lift is a Dopplemayr detachable quad chair built in 1988. The Roundhouse Chair at Alpine Meadows is also a Dopplemayr detachable quad chair, built in 1993. Odds are that the grips are the same or very similar to those on the Comet Express. An abundance of caution in this situation is appreciated and applauded. Then again, maybe there was something else going on. Roundhouse did open shortly after noon today.
There was also an incident on the Winter Park gondola in Colorado this week. A rocker beam that connects two sets of sheaves on the first tower had a material failure that allowed it to nearly shear in half. While there was not a danger of cabins falling to the ground or anything, the lift was immediately stopped. Almost 200 passengers were lowered to the ground via ropes by Ski Patrol. There were no injuries. Leitner-Poma supplied a new part and it was installed and tested, allowing the gondola to reopen in less than 48 hours.
Yes, we have similar Leitner-Poma lifts at Alpine Meadows and over at Palisades. The Base 2 Base Gondola, Treeline Cirque and the Red Dog lift next door all have the same design and about the same vintage as the Winter Park lift. I am 99% sure that these lifts would have been inspected for a similar issue here. The process would have been quick as that piece is primarily on the first tower.
As always, we have huge respect for the mountain operations teams that keep us moving uphill safely each day. You rock!
