Well, At Least It Is Not Crowded

I’ll be honest, today was not as good as the last two days. We have had a couple of relatively very good days that included decent powder turns. It wasn’t bottomless, but it was very skiable, with just an occasional bump from a hidden mogul or rut. But today’s storm came in wetter and with fierce winds, in particular from mid-mountain upward. Being the first day of the holiday blackout period with no teams on the mountain during a somewhat lackluster season, it was just about “country club skiing” at Alpine Meadows. That said, I cut my day pretty short, definitely shorter than I would like.

Your major lift choices today were limited to Hotter Wheels, Roundhouse and Summit. The first two did not experience as much wind as Summit, but suffered from warmer temperatures producing more sleet than snow. The groomed runs were somewhat velvety, but unless you covered every part of your face, you got pelted with stinging sleet crystals. The sting increased exponentially with your speed. With the high humidity, covering more of your face generally resulted in fogging of goggles, even those that “never fog.”

I sampled a number of off piste locations on the lower mountain and found the snow to be somewhat like skiing on a wet sponge. It wasn’t great for making controlled turns, unless you are Andy, with his famous “Wertheim Wiggle”. We tested Yellow, Chicken Leg and the small part of Robin Hood and Maid Marian you can access from TurboWeasel without dropping into Sherwood. The temperatures at the base area started off at about 31° this morning and then rose to 33° for most of the day. This does not create good powder skiing.

The better skiing was off of Summit, where the temperatures was around 28°. Better snow, but the trade off was some very stiff winds. Here’s the graph of winds measured at Tower 20, which is just before the top terminal, where winds ranged form 40 to 70mph for much of the day:

At the regular Ward peak sensor, just a bit higher up, the gusts measured 85-100mph through the ski day. So your choice today was wet or wild. After two very good days in a row, it was a bit disappointing.

The Challenges Will Continue

We have another two waves coming through as we head into the weekend and neither of them will lead to ideal ski conditions. The first of these promises to bring a decent amount of snow, but even more wind than we saw today. Here’s the Reno AFD:

Most of that snow is forecast to drop tonight. The actual point forecast for Alpine Meadows at mid mountain is for 9-13 inches overnight. The automated snow level forecast for Donner Summit shows snow levels at about 7000′ for much of that system. We are talking soggy base builder, not epic powder skiing. We shall see. Winds will likely be problematic again.

Saturday looks warmer and showery before the next storm moves in, the one that currently looks even warmer. Yikes. That said, it does end colder with a solid freeze for Monday.

Why Do We Keep Getting These Warm Storms?

This has not been a typical winter of any sort in the Sierra. If you spend any amount of time following the weather in the Sierra, there’s few examples of an “average winter”. We tend to get extremes of big winters and drier winters that result in “average statistics”. Currently we are in a pattern of reasonable wetness, but not much coldness. Taking a simple look at the PNA index gives us a clue:

In simplistic terms, a positive PNA indicates Pacific ridging and a negative one indicates the troughing associated with stronger and colder storms. Yeah we have not been in a troughing period during the entire month of December. Even during this last series, we are only weakly positive. Here’s a sample of what that looks like as the pressure anomaly:

A persistent “Baja Ridge” has kept Southern California almost precipitation free all season. The low pressure systems pass to our north, so we get just a small amount of precipitation , without much in the way of cold air support that lowers snow levels and increase convective activity. We do get the wind funneled between low pressure to the north and high pressure to the south. As of now, there is not any specific identifiable teleconnection that looks like it could change this soon.

For the ski industry and those that rely on visitation, this is bad news. While I enjoy the lack of traffic and ease of parking, I would rather see a happy medium of good snow without necessarily powder mania. Fortunately I don’t rely on this site to make any money as readership here is also down as there is less interest in skiing & riding right now. Hopefully we can get out of the wet phase and back to either a snowy phase or a drier period where skiing is more fun sometime soon.

See you tomorrow…hopefully.