Another Good Day And Five More Days Til Snow?

We spent another good day at Alpine Meadows, our first since last Monday.  Things have held up quite well in that time. The grooming staff continue to do an admirable job of making the best of a bad situation. Groomers are running about the same as always. There’s smooth corduroy in the morning followed by icy sections and slough piles later in the day in high traffic areas like Rock Garden and Lower Werners. The groomers ended up being quite crowded today. The parking lot was again relatively full and the shuttles just kept arriving from Squaw Valley.

We chose to escape the groomed runs, spending a lot of time poking around in a lot of different areas. Surprising, things remained essentially unchanged in most areas since last Monday. We had expected that warm temperatures early last week would have exposed far more obstacles, created icy conditions or erased some sneaker lines.

Lines were evident today at both Summit and Roundhouse. Gone are the days where lines moved quickly and efficiently, with chairs loaded fully. Today we spent a lot of time just waiting for people to move. Often one line would move like a flowing river, while another line went nowhere behind the people that were too timid or unaware that they should keep moving. People need direction. It’s frustrating to see 6 employees at Roundhouse and nobody taking control of things. Paging Kate and Karen!

We last mentioned that we would wait until Saturday and see if the models are still calling for snow at the end of the month. We’re happy to report that they are getting very consistent. All of the models are calling for snow in the Thursday to Sunday timeframe next weekend. The last four runs of the GFS were almost in exact agreement for both amounts and timing.

The weather is expected to be very warm early in the week. Some forecasts showed a rain event for Tuesday with highs near 60 in Truckee. That would have been a bad thing! Now the early week brings just fair and warm weather. The initial precipitation on Thursday could be a little wet before the colder air moves in with the front. Today’s models are showing up to 2.5 inches of moisture by Sunday, which means we could see a couple of feet of snow. As I said, my trip to SIA in Denver that weekend may have been the final snow charm we needed.

Take all of this with a small dose of disbelief too. We have seen some disappointments during this winter of our discontent. A few forecasters are saying that they see the ridge holding close enough to the coast to turn the storm into another inside slider, like the other drier storms we have had this season. The longer range forecasts continue that trend of a very cold and dry period for us, which if fine if we get a good dose of snow first.

Update: If you check out BA’s update from 8pm yesterday, he’s seeing the same trend and more. The Canadian model showed up to 5 feet of snow yesterday morning and was clearly the outlier. As of last night, all of the models were coming toward the solution of some major dumpage next weekend. I’ll definitely be updating later today.