With the opening date lurching ever closer for Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley, we keep looking for positive signs in the weather forecast. We have looked at all of the models and checked on the opinions of several other weather bloggers, hoping to find some sign. Yup, that’s what we did.
Well, the good news is that the snowmaking team at Alpine Meadows has kicked things into high gear with this week’s cold temperatures. Previous efforts were mostly concentrated on covering Kangaroo for a race event December 7th. But the snow guns were blazing furiously this morning on Roundhouse, and coverage is improving rapidly. Reportedly, teams will be training early at Alpine Meadows before the public opening on the 13th.
Temperatures will warm up a bit this week, which will put a damper on daytime snowmaking. Temperatures should remain cold enough overnight for the snow guns to fire nightly. We sure hope that’s the way it goes as Mother Nature will be needing a lot of help. We just can’t win with the weather yet.
The usual media sources have been doing what they can to emphasize the possibility of snow for Thanksgiving day, but each successive model run of the GFS and NAM models put the storm track further off shore, pushing the storm to the south of us. NOAA still holds out for a chance of snow on Thursday and Friday. The Short Range Ensemble Forecast still shows the Thanksgiving day storm moving far enough inland to drop 3 to 6 inches of snow, mostly near the crest. We sure hope that model is the correct model.
In the longer range GFS forecast, things continue to look challenging. In fact, it almost looks like a cruel joke is being pulled by the snow gods. Watching a loop of the GFS model out through Day 16 is comical. You can only laugh and hope things somehow get better. The maps below show total precipitation. That’s right, TOTAL precipitation. By December 5th, the GFS model shows zero precipitation, yes, zero. By the 10th, we have picked up around an inch of precip, or roughly a foot of snow.
Things can and do change. We’ll do what we can to keep you updated as the situation progresses. For what it’s worth, local snowmakers are making the best of the situation. Skiing and riding was reported as “excellent” and “awesome” at Northstar and Heavenly this weekend. Mammoth also opened up Chair 2, doubling the amount of terrain open. Northstar will likely be open to the summit by next weekend. Mount Rose is also working hard to be open with at least one top to bottom run by next weekend.
For us Squalpine pass holders…Alpine Meadows is looking far better than the base areas at Squaw. Hopefully Squaw Valley is making snow up top…not much has been reported on that. Hug a snowmaker, or buy them a beer, as we’ll be relying on their efforts for a while longer.