Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Programming…

We have had an amazing run for the last three days, and some would say five days, but today was back to our regular programming. It’s not that the skiing was not good today, it just wasn’t amazing like it was the last few days. The temperatures did warm yesterday afternoon, which cooked just about all of the powder and large parts of our winter snow. Only the perfectly north facing terrain escaped sun damage and heat damage as yesterday was a bluebird day with a pretty high sun angle. Back on January 1st, the angle of the sun from the horizon is only 28°at our latitude. Today, one day before the spring equinox, the angle of the sun is now 51°. That more direct angle of sunlight cooks the snow quickly, even on a cold day.

Typically, after these bouts of spring powder, the remedy for the chunky remnants we call chunder would be grooming. Unfortunately there was a lack of grooming this morning that limited options for how to get down the mountain. I do know that once again, our favorite mountain has had a shortage of grooming personnel lately. Whether this is due to sickness, travel issues or cost cutting is unknown. I did hear that even the mountain manager was taking shifts in a snowcat over the weekend to make sure things got done.

The list of things that should have been groomed but were not today included Sunspot, Terry’s, much of Alpine Bowl, Wolverine Saddle, Wolverine Bowl, Ladies Slalom, Twilight Zone and Shooting Star. Also left in a wild state were D8 and Yellow, but those actually skied pretty well today as mogul runs once the chunder got a bit ironed out by test dummies like myself. Then there’s the things that did get done, like Howards Hollow and Kangaroo that made us shrug. The Kangaroo lift wasn’t even open today. I suppose someone could have had a race training emergency.

There were some areas that skied pretty well without being groomed today, all sharing that trait of being very north facing. The Palisades, Sympathy Face and Rolls and Knolls were all very skiable today, as long as you were mogul tolerant.

South facing terrain was a challenge today. It was warm enough to get a bit slushy yesterday, then refreeze into a firm surface. Whether it was a groomed slope or ungroomed, it was very slow to soften today. A thin layer of high clouds impeded the suns rays. There is a little bit of corn transition underway. The southern groomed slopes would rate +1 🌽 today. Sherwood Face and Scotty’s Beam both got the elusive -1 🌽 rating today as they were rock hard chunder with little softening or smoothing.

Yes, these transition days after a spring powder event are not always the best days for skiing and riding.

The Chance For Snow Tonight Doesn’t Look Great

The auto generated point forecast for snowfall at Alpine Meadows tonight looks overly optimistic. Right at this minute it is showing 3 to 7 inches of snowfall possible overnight. If that happens, things might be reasonably fun tomorrow. I spent 30 minutes looking at various models and model runs that support that idea and I cannot find it. Here’s the latest run of the short range NAM for snowfall through Friday morning:

When I ran the model comparison of 9 models, for the same timeline, they all showed 1-2 inches of snowfall. Those model runs have been pretty consistent for the last 24 hours. I think that since neither the Sacramento or Reno offices of NOAA have released even a Winter Weather Advisory is telling, or maybe it’s just that all of the employees have been let go. 😢 The most likely outcome tomorrow is a dust on crust day. We shall see.

Palisades Tahoe is stating that there has been 59 inches of snow in the last 7 days. Putting that together with an earlier system in March, the likely story is that we will come close to average snowfall for the month. We will see a drying and warming trend next week. We are talking exceptionally warm, as in 60° temperatures. I hope not, but the ridging looks strong. Here’s a GIF showing a very solid ridge holding about 10 days before a trough gets close to moving in to California.

Note that movement of the trough toward the coast, but then retrograding instead of moving in. That is not strong storm signal. I would not count on a big change for April yet. I watched most of Daniel Swain’s (WeatherWest.com) “office hours” video on Youtube this afternoon, paying most of my attention to seeing possibilities for April. Right now, it does not look great for additional snowfall.

I took two screen captures of a “super model” that is an ensemble of ensembles. In weatherspeak, an ensemble run is created by feeding in slightly different input data for current conditions, which generally give a more accurate assessment of things by mixing the outcomes. The “super model” includes data from US models, Canadian models, Japanese models, the Euro, etc. So here’s the potential for ridging versus troughing for April. That shows a high probability of a ridge covering much of the US. Ouch.

The second image is for the temperature anomaly during the month of April. It’s showing significantly higher than average temperatures during the month of April.

Don’t blame me. I am just showing you what the models are seeing at this time. These are not ideal conditions that we want to see as skiers or people that don’t want fire season to begin next month. When we look at these longer range models, it does not mean that there is not a possibility of isolated incidents of much cooler and wetter periods. The last 7 days in Tahoe would be a great example of that.

As skiers and riders all we can do is keep showing up and enjoying the conditions for what they will be. This is why I can enjoy spring corn and adventure lines as the snow melts just as much I can enjoy a great powder day like yesterday. I finally have my new ski boots completely dialed in and along with the new-ish Moment skis, I am ready to tackle whatever conditions we see tomorrow and through the rest of the season. See you out there tomorrow!