Turning Down The Hype

I love good skiing as much, or more, than most people. But today I will turn down the hype a bit, because I believe in setting realistic expectations. So in this report I am going to set some realistic expectations for current conditions as we head into the weekend, talk about changes to the biggest winter storm yet next week. Finally, I also will give a report on the new Slopes and Ikon app integration, which probably isn’t as useful as you might think.

The final numbers are in, showing 4-9 inches of snow out of that last little storm. I wish I could say it was a game changer, but it was not. It has brought a lot more people to the mountain over the last few days, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if nearly 100% of the mountain were still open. It is not.

I milked the most fun I could out of that powder over the last two days. There were still a few short stashes out there this morning, but with sunny skies and mountain temps approaching the forties today, things were rapidly getting cooked. I had high hopes that the new snow might revitalize the groomed runs, but truth be told, they might be a bit worse. We had progressed into a pretty good corn cycle, so the groomed runs stayed significantly smoother and mostly free of stickiness. Now that we have had some warm temperatures, the groomed runs were quickly shaved down to hardpack quickly today, while the loose new snow turned into clumpy sticky sludge.

98% of skier and rider traffic has been on the groomed runs today and yesterday, so although visitors numbers are not super high, the main groomers are extremely busy. Much of that traffic continues to be middle aged men living out their Olympic dreams. I absolutely would encourage Ski Patrol to get more active in “ski pass management”.

Off piste conditions are extremely variable. Anyplace that gets sun is now manky new snow over an icy substrate. Shaded north facing terrain still has wintery puffs over icy moguls. No wonder most people are sticking to the groomed runs. There are some exceptions to things that are skiing a little better, generally places that get a bit more traffic. As examples I would include Peril Ridge, D7, Sympathy and Rolls N Knolls.

If you’re coming and expecting that you will still find big stashes of powder, like you heard about on the Mountain Surf Report, you’re gonna be disappointed. If you’re coming and don’t know that Sherwood will not reopen until after the big storm next week, you will be disappointed. If you are expecting to ski High Traverse, the upper bowls, Arts Knob, Expert Shortcut, Scott Chute or a mini-park at Tiegel, you will be disappointed.

This is the perfect time to remind you that the Unofficial Alpine Meadows mobile app is the easiest way to see these details. More info here.

If you have an open mindset and want to rally some groomers and explore other off piste terrain this weekend, it will be fun. If you are looking to see some music on the Sun Deck, the Golden Cadillacs play on Saturday around 2 pm.

Slightly Smallerized Storm Potential

Ever so slightly, the potential for this storm has minimized bit by bit. If you follow the influencers that have over-hyped the snowfall forecast, you may find yourself disappointed. Just for starters, you may have noticed how the starting point for this storm has continually been kicked down the road. First it was Thursday, then Friday, then Saturday, then Sunday…and now late Sunday night. The same thing has happened on the other end. A five day storm has now been compressed to a 2+ day storm. It’s still likely to be the biggest storm of the season yet, but we are not talking about anything miraculous.

Will it save the season? If you’re talking about continuing operations at Sherwood, Scott and Lakeview, yes, it should. Will it extend the season to July 4th or Memorial Day? Most likely not unless it is followed by another half dozen huge storms. In just quick numbers, 4 days ago the GEFS showed a potential for 72″ of snowfall; 2 days ago it showed 61″ of snow fall. This afternoon the GEFS is showing 57 inches through Wednesday.

The Reno and Sacramento offices of NOAA both released an initial Winter Storm Watch for the event today. There’s always some discrepancy for snowfall amounts between the two offices as the west slope of the Sierra does see more snowfall in most storms.

Blending the guidance from the two offices is probably a reasonable guess at this point. Note the 100 mph wind gusts from the Reno office. This is now the norm for big Sierra storms. What does this mean? Likely lift closures on Monday and Tuesday. It also means that snow loading will be intensified as winds move that new snow around. This will absolutely increase the avalanche danger. That impacts how quickly mountain ops people can get on the mountain and get lifts and terrain open again. I liked it better when it was a series of weaker storms gradually building the pack.

TL;DR There’s a good probability of very limited mountain operations for Monday, Tuesday and possibly Wednesday. Travel on roads probably won’t be a picnic either. Expect that it will take some time for all areas of the mountain to reopen.

The Slopes App and the Ikon Pass App Connection

My heart was broken last week when the latest Ikon Pass app update touted an integration with the independent Slopes app. Being honest here, Alterra has a poor record when it comes to “making things better.” The worst thoughts went through my head, the first being “Did Alterra just buy the Slopes app?”

You already know about how I quit using the Palisades Tahoe app and chose to use the Slopes app instead of the Ikon app. If not, read about that here and here.

So I fired off a request for an informal interview to the Slopes app developer, Curtis, with a whole list of questions. Here’s the most important answer, “I’ve said it publicly many times: I have no intention of selling Slopes. Me and my team are getting to do what we love every day, and the odds of that surviving any kind of sale is low and we know it.” Phew!

Here’s some quick details, once you have enabled the connection between the apps in their account preferences:

• If you track your day in the Slopes app, at the end of your day, that informations gets pushed to the Ikon pass app. You earn the silly Ikon achievements and could opt in to the leaderboards.

• If you track your day in the Ikon Pass app, at the end of your day, the stats get handed off to the Slopes app. There’s a benefit here if you also ski or ride at non-Alterra resorts as all of your data can be in one place. I am curious if the regular map data will also appear as that is not available in the Ikon Pass app.

• Live data is not passed from the Slopes app to the Ikon Pass app. This is the location data that is used to estimate lift wait times.

• Historical data is also not passed in either direction. Data is shared only from the time you enable the integration. Bummer as I have 15 million plus vertical feet of data stored in the Ikon data that was transferred from the Palisades Tahoe app. It would be nice to get it all it one place. Let it go Mark.

• Ikon Pass app user benefits: You don’t have to run two apps to get Ikon leaderboard status plus the enhanced stats of the Slopes app. You might also be able to get mapping data to see your day, or pass off to other apps to do things like generate a heat map of where you ski the most on the mountain.

• Slopes app user benefits: You don’t have to run two apps to get Ikon leaderboard status. The Ikon pass does break stats into how many times you ride each lift, and each run. If you have read my article on the Palisades/Ikon app, thats wildly inaccurate.

Now for the dirty details. I ran the Slopes app as normal the last two days. The information did not transfer to the Ikon Pass app until after I restarted my phone.

Today I tracked using the Ikon Pass app. First off, I did not burst into flames. Second, I forgot that the Palisades app and now the Ikon Pass app give a notification chime at the fourth tower of every lift you ride. I learned to tune that out the last few years. But now that I get useful notifications for the Unofficial Alpine Meadows app, it got confusing, ie as Scott Chair went on and off mechanical hold multiple times today and I missed that with so many notification chimes.

More importantly, I stopped skiing hours ago and the Ikon Pass app has not handed off today’s stats to Slopes yet. I checked with support and got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  response. Maybe there is a CRON job that needs to run on a server someplace in Denver to make that happen.

Update: Yesterday’s data never got sent to Slopes, lost in the space time continuum. Thus endeth my integration experiment.

I’ll be turning off the integration now that I have seen it. I will continue to use the Slopes app for tracking, and the Unofficial Alpine Meadows app for other info, as I was before this week.

See you out there tomorrow. Skiing is fun.