I Can See Clearly Now…

Yeah, you know the words:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-shiny day

Johnny Nash, 1972

Well parts of that are true. It was much sunnier today. There wasn’t mist or raindrops on my goggles to obscure my vision. That was important, as there were certainly obstacles in my way, namely a lot of people on the few open runs at Alpine Meadows. Add to that the snow was pretty funky and that good visibility became a very real necessity.

In case you didn’t get the memo, this was quite a consequential rain event in the Tahoe region. A week ago, we saw about 100 inches of snowfall at the crest of the Sierra. It was a storm that looked like it would be transformational for our ski season. Here we are just a week later. Over 5.5 inches of warm rain fell at the base of the mountain, reducing the snowpack at the automated sensor at the base of the mountain by 30%. Yikes! Now that we have had a chance to look at the top of mountain, it’s like that big snow storm did not even happen.

Typically you might have expected that we would see a lot of flooding in the area, similar to the flooding around New Years of 1997. Fortunately, this storm had very little in the way of dynamics that would have caused an even higher rate of precipitation. Instead this storm brought us about 60 hours of steady rainfall that did not generate big floods. Maybe you didn’t even know it was raining, not snowing in Tahoe.

Ski Patrol also thought the snow was weird today, with large swaths of the mountain not open today. The snow was just too wet, too soft and too sticky to allow for turns without leaving 8 inch deep ruts. At the top of Summit, everything north of the upper terminal was closed today, including all of Wolverine, Sunspot, the D’s and Peril Ridge. Alpine Bowl was groomed overnight and skied pretty well until it became huge mogul piles of wet slush. Although you could ski over toward ABC, few people took more than a turn or two off piste before declaring it unskiable.

Temperatures were in the mid thirties to forty degrees overnight, and heavy cloud cover kept the relative humidity at 80 to 90%. The moist air has more mass than dry air. That means it is very efficient at moving that heat into the snow surface. Nothing froze last night, not even close. Daytime temperatures near 50° only made the snow softer and stickier.

I did some math this afternoon. Alpine Meadows has about 2400 acres of skiable terrain. Of that, only about 750 acres consists of named ski runs. Of that, only about 240 acres was open for skiing and riding today. That’s only 10% of the mountain. Of that terrain that was open, probably only about half of that, or 5% of the mountain was decent for skiing and riding today. Now you can see why things felt quite busy today.

Notably closed today was Lakeview and Sherwood. We had hoped to at least get to the top of TLC this morning to take a peek at the state of affairs at Sherwood, as the TLC status does say “Open”, not “Open To Mid Station”. Alas, the upper part of TLC was not open, so there were no peeks available. Reportedly, there was a large lake at the bottom of both Lakeview and Sherwood after the storm. Otherwise, coverage at Lakeview still looks okay from afar. I am worried about Sherwood. Mother Nature gave us a snow bounty, then immediately took it away. That was mean.

There’s two things the mountain needs, some colder overnight temperatures and more grooming. Your typical snowcat used to groom runs overnight weighs 15,000 to 20,000 pounds. Trying to drive that over the Slurpee like snow currently on the mountain is not an easy task. Overnight temperatures are still forecast in the mid 30’s, but hopefully we can lose the humidity tonight so the air carries less heat. Hopefully the mountain ops team can work some magic to get more terrain groomed out and skiable before we get to the weekend.

More Rain Or More Snow?

Theoretically, tomorrow is mostly sunny and a few degrees warmer. As much as we really need and want snow right now, we are looking at rain first. There’s a 30-50% chance of rain on Saturday, depending on which model you look at. Snow levels don’t look to get below the base area until about opening time on Sunday. Looking at the model runs today, we could see another 1/2 inch of rain overnight Saturday before we see snow…a whole 1-2 inches of snow. We would like more.

It’s worth noting here that meteorological spring starts on Sunday March 1st. Some of the biggest snow storms in the history of the Sierra did happen in the month of March. That is not in the current models. The last few runs show maybe five inches in the next 16 days. This is our reality. If it’s not going to snow, hopefully we can get into a place where we see some good overnight freezes to get our corn cycle in gear, because the slush and mashed potatoes will get old quickly.

Skiing is fun, at least 75% of it today. See you out there.