Chasing Pockets Of Sun

The forecast called for some snow today, a whole inch or so, so nothing that will change the nature of this ski season. Under those circumstances, I would rather that it just stay sunny. Sure there will be those that will be quick to argue about preserving the quality of the snow and slowing the melt, but it just was not that cold. Overnight temperatures at Alpine Meadows barely reached freezing, which led to some awesome ski conditions to start the day. We had a mountain free of cookies this morning, except for those served up by Melanie at Treats or Sully at The Chalet.

It was a day to cruise the small part of the mountain that was open to see what we could find. Sherwood is done for the season, and Scott and Lakeview were on wind hold, until that status changed to closed around noon. All of the groomed snow skied about the same today, more of a sugary rotten snow than good corn. It’s great for a few runs, but quickly gets rutted and bumped up. Finding those places that were less busy led to the best results. The Fast Lane was one of those places today, with almost no traffic due to Scott being closed.

Some of the sunnier locations on the mountain did have better corn snow conditions. Early turns on Sunspot and later turns on Ladies Slalom offered better corn.

Right about 10:45 a squall line did blow through dropping some precipitation. There was some debate in our group about whether it was snow, sleet or graupel falling from the sky. It added up to nothing. We did note that the squall ushered in some colder air, which stiffened up the snow surface a bit.

Keepin’ It Real

This is the time of the year where ski areas start announcing potential closing dates. Mammoth Mountain was first to say that they would operate through Memorial Day this season. This sounds great, until you remember that this is a very low bar for Mammoth. In a good year, Mammoth can stay open pretty easily until the 4th of July. In the big year of 2023, Mammoth did not close until August 6th.

Yesterday, the official ops blog of Palisades Tahoe also announced that they would also stay open until Memorial Day. Here’s the screen shot:

Truth be told, they probably can do that. You just have to understand that the reality means that they can probably hold just the Shirley Lake terrain through the month of May. If they work hard with snow farming, they can hopefully keep a WROD going to the Funitel or High Camp. That same blog post did some extreme cherry picking of data. First and foremost, it spent a lot of paragraphs talking about the biggest five day snow total since 1970. I saw that claim from the Sierra Snow Lab. I don’t have all of the records, but I am willing to bet there are several bigger examples of snowfall at both Alpine Meadows and Palisades Tahoe, with March of 1982 immediately jumping to my mind.

While they did mention the rain that followed all of that snow, they did not tell the whole story. They did mention how the rainfall can improve the snowpack in terms of consolidation and accelerating corn development, as we always say. But they did not talk about the amounts of rain and how it may have reduced the snowpack. I have already told you that the 5.5 inches (or more) of rainfall from that second storm reduced the snowpack at the base of Alpine Meadows by 40%. I’ve also mentioned this week that the rain followed by warm temperatures led to more of a “rotten snow” condition rather true corn in many areas.

I got a chance to look at the updated official snow totals for Alpine Meadows after the month of February, and the February numbers look great:

54 Year Average for February Snowfall	76 inches
February 2026 Snowfall	98 inches or 128% of average

So that looks fantastic, but it’s not quite a “Fantastic February”. In terms of snowfall, it is the 21st most snowy February out of 54 years of data. That’s before we saw all of that rain the next week. As far as seasonal totals, we now stand at 75% of average snowfall at the base of Alpine Meadows.

Yes, things are significantly better higher on the mountain. But at Alpine Meadows, you kind of need to be able to get back down the mountain. Theoretically they could use hundreds of gallons of diesel to push snow from Alpine Bowl to the lower runouts, but that will not happen. With only a few hours of snowmaking each night, there is not a realistic hope of keeping the lower runouts covered with snow guns either.

In July of 2023, yes, people were willing to slog through a muddy runout to get back to Summit. But the novelty of skiing on the Fourth of July was the driving force there. There would probably be less incentive to do that in May, when your mountain bike or sailboat is calling your name, or you can just go to Mammoth Mountain.

I would be delightfully surprised if Scott and Lakeview make it past this weekend, especially as temperatures rise this weekend and early next week. Coverage is really thin and those areas don’t really benefit from the cooler east winds expected the next couple of days.

No Miracles In Sight

The GIF below shows the pressure anomalies for the next 16 days, which gets us through the third week of March. You can see how today’s low moves south and retrogrades into SoCal, which will be the cause of the east winds the next couple of days. After that it’s basically high pressure ridging with just a slight chance of inside sliders out in Fantasyland.

Here’s the total snowfall during that same period according to the last run of the GFS ensembles. Most of that is out beyond day 10 in Fantasyland. The 10 previous runs of the GEFS showed mostly similar solutions.

The opportunities for skiing are dwindling and that will likely only get worse in the coming weeks. Go skiing, because skiing is fun.