A Good Day For Ducks

Yes, I read the forecast. I knew that the snow level was going to be about 1000 feet higher than Ward Peak at Alpine Meadows. Still, I went skiing today. I am here to tell you that it was just about my wettest ski day in recent memory. It’s not that it was raining all that hard. The remote sensors are showing about a half inch has fallen since midnight. But the wind pushed that rain into places it should not be. My current FlyLow kit actually does a good job of dealing with wetness when it’s falling straight out of the sky, or when you’re sitting in a puddle on the chairlift.

But those winds blew it inside of my jacket via the head hole, where the 3L fabric funneled it into every layer of clothing. It also blew rain up into the cuffs, where it soaked my nice Hestra C-Zone gloves from the inside outward. Each glove weighed like three pounds after just 90 minutes of skiing. Water was blown into the vent holes at the front of my helmet, were it then dripped through and into my goggles, forming little pools of water inside of my goggles that worked like a bubble level to let me know if my head was level while skiing. Water doesn’t normally get forced into these places. It was wet and windy.

Andy mentioned that he went skiing yesterday because it was too late to cancel his parking reservation. I think my list of reasons why I went skiing today is a bit more solid:

1. It was day 47 of my skiing streak
2. The bacon at Viva Treats is addictive
3. Lakeview opened today
4. I need to get my money’s worth out of my new $2.50 Ski-Gee purchase

Truth be told, once you got past the wetness of the day, the actual skiing part was quite good. Two days of rain has consolidated the snow into a dense base that is firm but edge-able. Since I was on a mission to ski new terrain, almost everything I skied today was very smooth corduroy that held up very nicely. With appropriate wax there was no drag. Well travelled off piste snow also skied well. But there is still some untracked snow that has a very high water content out there that wants to ruin your knees.

One bonus that we noted today was that Ski Patrol has been very diligent about cutting little pine boughs and branches, twigs and moss, then spreading it around each and every slope. This greatly increased visibility on the mountain. Truth be told, it was the high winds that have spread all of that debris. But you still might make a patroller smile if you thank them for the effort.

I Love Lakeview

Yes, so this was a bit of a surprise. Typically Lakeview is the last of the lifts to open at Alpine Meadows. Sherwood is generally opened first. I guess it’s a good sign that the mountain ops crew was able to farm enough snow east of Scott Peak to build out Leisure Lane and the top of Mountain View and Outer Limits. This gives visitors more space to spread out on the mountain and adds two additional groomed runs for the holiday crowd. That said, there was not much time to experience Lakeview today before it went on wind hold. We took a very windy ride up, and had time to take a photo of the lake, then a herd of patrollers let us know Lakeview was closing and to head back toward Scott or Weasel. So I had two half runs on Mountain View today.

Sure Would!

I may love Sherwood even more than I love Lakeview. I generally make trips to the top of Hotter Wheels each day, when the top is open, just to take a look at the current status. Yesterday the official Friday Mountain Operations blog said:

“Our grooming team has been out creating snow berms that will hopefully capture more snow“

I’m curious about that. I did notice that a snow cat made some switch back turns on the Sherwood Run a day or two ago, just below the Return Road cutoff. That left some “berms” and they were filled in today. Maybe it worked! I guess this is better than the constant messaging of “We need way more snow to open Sherwood”. Sherwood please!

What Will Tomorrow Bring?

Hopefully tomorrow will look different because I have had about enough out of this rain.At least I could make the choice to leave the mountain today when it got uncomfortably wet. But the lift operators, patrollers and other staff on the mountain don’t get that choice and I am sure they are ready for a break too.

So the good news is that the snow levels should drop by the time the mountain opens tomorrow. As of this post, it looks like it gets to the base by opening and lake level by closing. Again it won’t be the best powder ever, but it will be better than rain. There are a couple of nagging questions.

• This is supposed to be a very windy system, even by Sierra standards. The Reno AFD mentions the standard warnings of ridge winds over 100 mph. What alarms me is the lower level winds. The AFD also calls for winds up to 50 mph on the lake and 40+mph in the foothill areas around Reno. Windholds on many lifts are a very real probability if things pan out this way. Anybody that is planning on driving over Donner Summit tomorrow should take note of the potential for closures tomorrow.

• We currently have a very saturated snowpack, and as temperatures drop overnight that snowpack will get much firmer. We could see some icy conditions under that new snow as it falls. Hopefully not, but it certainly is possible if not probable.

The upshot is that tomorrow could be very limited for mountain operations, but should put a good refresh on the mountain. Enough for Sherwood? Have I said I love Sherwood?

In the longer term, the models have been evolving over the last 24 hours. The GFS and GEFS were previously seeing a stronger ridge build in starting Monday. But yesterday, some of the other models started introducing more weak systems between now and the end of the holiday period on the 5th. Looking at the last two runs of the GFS, it is seeing this same trend. None of those look big as of this writing. Right now they look like they could be more of the same weak and warm systems we have seen lately. Personally I would prefer a dry forecast. But it does bear watching, I will take a closer look in my next post.