J.Spin

Per the discussion in the NNE Winter Thread last night, our most recent winter storm system started up yesterday afternoon. Snow levels were up above 1,000’ to start, but they gradually came down in elevation, and the valleys were reporting a mix of rain and snow in the evening. By 7:00 P.M. we started getting initial slushy accumulations on elevated surfaces down here at the 500-foot elevation, and it took a bit more time for the temperatures to drop below freezing, but within a couple of hours they’d fallen enough that the accumulations really started to take hold. Although we only had an inch or two of snow accumulation here at our site, we picked up 0.40 inches of liquid equivalent from the system, so the snow for the local mountains probably had at least a half inch of liquid in it. That’s definitely enough to get into the realm of a modest resurfacing. When I saw Bolton Valley’s initial early morning report of 3 to 4 inches of snow, I decided that mid-fats were the practical play for today’s skis. My younger son had the day off from work, and I’d planned to get him up if the morning snowfall numbers were substantial enough, but 3-4” was modest enough that I decided to let him sleep in and I headed up by myself to sample what the storm had brought us. Heading up the Bolton Valley Access Road, the elevation dependence of the snowfall was stark: I had ascended above 1,000’ before there was really more than a trace of new accumulation in that area. And even after that, accumulations were slow to increase; it wasn’t until I hit the Bolton Valley Village at 2,000’ that I really felt the accumulation were substantial enough that they were going to make a big impact in the skiing. I did find 3 to 4 inches of new snow at 2,000’ when I did some checks around the Village, so that was encouraging – if the main base had that much new accumulation at that point, it was likely going to be more in the higher elevations. The Wilderness Double Chair was scheduled to start running at 10:00 A.M., so my plan was to kick off the day’s ski session with some touring before Wilderness lift access was available. I ascended up to ~2,700’ to one of my usual transition points by the time lift-service was underway, so my initial descent was from there. My descent was via a combination of Cougar and Lower Turnpike, and the powder turns were excellent. On low-angle terrain, the new snow was substantial enough that it easily provided 100% bottomless powder turns, and on medium-angle terrain I’d say it was in the range of ~80% bottomless turns. The new snow was medium weight powder in probably the 8% H2O range, and just dry enough that you could keep moving fine on even low-angle terrain. When I’d descended to the base of the Wilderness Chair it was one wind hold, and they suspected it would be about 30 minutes before it would be back up, so I checked out the other lift offerings. The Snowflake Chair offered some great turns with a few inches of powder over a groomed base on Sprig O’ Pine, and off the Mid Mountain Chair, Beech Seal had excellent natural accumulations that had resurfaced even the manmade snow on the skier’s left to a good degree. Off the Vista Quad Chair, Sherman’s Pass is finally open, so I used it to make my way back over toward the Wilderness terrain, which delivered great natural snow turns as usual. Riding the Vista Quad, I found that the winds were howling above 3,000’, and temperatures were dropping well into the 20s F. It was getting bitter up there. In terms of snowfall and accumulations, there was at least light to moderate snowfall during my entire ski session, and it was pounding 1-2”/hour snowfall for a while just as I was starting the initial ascent of my ski tour. With continued snowfall and rates like that, it wasn’t surprising that accumulations had jumped up a bit from the initial morning report. Here’s the approximate snow accumulations profile I found from this event as of about midday when I was leaving the mountain: 340’: T 500’: T” 1,000’: T-1” 1,200’: 0.5-1” 1,500’: 1-2” 2,000’: 3-4” 2,500’: 5-6” 3,000’: 6-7” It was really windy up at the Vista Summit, and I couldn’t get access to the usual protected spots I like to use to gauge depth, so what I’ve put down is my best estimate. Overall though, isolating depths for the snow from this most recent storm was relatively easy because we had some warmth earlier this week that consolidated the top of the snowpack. Like with the last storm though, it’s not a rock-hard subsurface – it’s a spongy interface and the new snow has bonded well to it, so that’s great for the skiing. For the elevations below 1,500’, those depths reported above are actually more than what was there when I initially ascended the access road in the morning, because the heavy snowfall during the morning had added accumulations there that hadn’t been present earlier. I was surprised that the base of Timberline at 1,500’ only had an inch or two of new snow, so even being where the precipitation fell as all snow wasn’t quite enough to get solid accumulations that would dramatically affect the resurfacing of the slopes; you really needed another 500 feet or so to get into the best stuff. The continued snowfall today was definitely having an effect though, as evidenced by some of the midday updates to the Bolton Valley Snow Report: 10:30am Update: How's about a couple of rope drops? Glades, Swing, Fanny and more have joined the ranks since we opened this morning, and the snow is still coming down. 12:15pm Update: The ropes keep dropping - we're adding Bolton Outlaw, Peggy Dow's, Cougar, Old Turnpike, and Lower crossover to the mix! This storm was a great way to kick the conditions up some notches as we head toward Christmas, and with a couple more clippers on the way in the coming days plus cold temperatures for the foreseeable future, it looks like conditions will be improving throughout the coming week.

We've been mixing for a while as well down here at 500 feet, and there's a bit of slushy accumulation on the elevated snowboard. The temperature is falling faster now around here, so more snow is mixing in and the snow line is definitely coming down.

After the relatively warm midweek storm moved across the area, we picked up an inch or two of snow in the valley between the back side of that system and the lake-effect snow that followed it. While the storm wasn’t quite a net gain for the snowpack here at our site, we only lost a couple tenths of an inch of snow water equivalent in the snow on the ground, so it was fairly inconsequential in that regard. It did mean a thaw-freeze cycle for the snowpack though, so once temperatures came down, the snowpack was solid with just a bit of fresh snow on top. This was the first notable consolidation event of the season at our site, so we finally transitioned to a much more robust snowpack down at the house now vs. what was there before. It had slowly been settling and consolidating on its own, but it was still somewhat dry, and you could dig down to the ground fairly easily. That midweek storm was likely a net gain for liquid in the mountain snowpack, but I assumed off piste surfaces would be quite hard after the thaw-freeze, similar to what we experience down in the valley. I’d been hearing some good reports out of the mountains with regard to the backside accumulations from the storm, but it was hard to image it would be enough to really get the off piste and backcountry conditions back to where there were earlier in the week. With that in mind, my wife and I headed up to Bolton Valley for some snowshoeing on Saturday. We always find that snowshoeing is a nice change of pace if the snowpack is likely to be punchy, crusty, or icy, since even Nordic skiing with those conditions can be unpleasant if the snow is too firm. We figured we’d mostly be using the crampons on our snowshoes during the tour as we expected something in the range of a dust-on-crust snowpack, but that wasn’t the case at all. I was amazed to find that at around the 2,000’-2,200’ elevations where we toured, there were 6 to 10 inches of powder above the base layers. And, the base wasn’t even rock hard, it was a crumbly interface with the powder above it that made for excellent touring. We couldn’t believe that we were actually having to use the floatation of our snowshoes because of the depth of the powder, and the crampons were needed only occasionally in packed areas. The resort was reporting 8 inches of new snow in the past 48 hours, and it really wasn’t just eye candy, all that new snow set up some very pleasant snow surfaces. The only major issues we noted on Saturday were that some of the water bars had been blow out by the rain. Those areas required some extra navigation, and we could see that people had established routes around them on popular ascents like the Bryant Trail. I’d say our observations were right in line with the big washout on Gondolier at Stowe that Powderfreak talked about – the snowpack itself wasn’t damaged all the much by the rain, the more notable effects were on drainage/water bars. Experiencing the quality of the snow on Saturday, it was obvious that the powder skiing would be great on low to moderate angle terrain, so my son and I headed out for a ski tour on Bolton’s Nordic & Backcountry Network on Sunday. We toured up the Bryant Trail to about the base of the Big Blue area. We wanted to stick to more moderate and low-angle terrain that was a best fit for the depth and density of the powder, so we began our descent in the lower reaches of Big Blue, then worked our way through the relatively low-angle terrain between the Bryant and Coyote trails. Later on the descent we crossed to the west side of Bryant, skied the upper sections of the Cup Runneth Over glade, and finished out with turn on the untracked areas of World Cup. The resort hadn’t set formal Nordic grooming tracks up in those areas of World Cup, but there was a track line that had been made by skiers, and the rest of the trail was untracked powder. Those areas of World Cup were very open and provided some of the most consistent powder turns of the day. The pitch was also perfect for the depth and consistency of the powder, and my son said those sections were actually his favorite turns of the tour.

VT-WS-19 is the number for our reporting station through CoCoRaHS, and all the data are publicly available through their site – PF often posts their maps of rain, snowfall, snowpack, etc. here in the forum. A number of people in the forum are members: https://cocorahs.org/ It’s not as involved as being a reporter for an NWS Coop site – there are fewer of those. And I believe CoCoRaHS likes morning observations with a preference for reporting somewhere in the 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. range (the preferred specific time to submit CoCoRaHS precipitation data is 7 AM, but you can report whenever works for you, and many people do). If I recall correctly, I think Tamarack has his own time for reporting during the day, to keep his data consistent with what he had been doing for years.

As I mentioned in my recent mountain report, things have been busy between skiing and work, but this most recent system has helped with a little downtime to get some numbers together. For the winter season thus far at our site, the only thing holding it back from really tracking with some of the top dogs has been November. Snowfall for November here in the valley was about a foot below average, so that really set things behind. You can see this in the blue line in the first plot below – the cumulative snowfall plot was rather flat with only minimal accumulations from various warmer/smaller storms until the end of the month when it finally began to rise. It certainly wasn’t a bottom of the barrel November, but it’s been a decade since we’ve had a November with less snow than this one, so that says something. I don’t really track temperatures, but it was pretty warm for a good chunk of the month. Last season, the tenor of November was vastly different. The snowstorms began churning from the first of the month, and of course the cumulative snowfall plot started climbing right from that point as well. You can see that in the red line in the second plot below. We never really blasted well away from average November snowfall pace, but we stayed at or above it for the whole month and overall, it at least came in as a solid/decent snowfall month. You can really see the contrast in snowfall between this November (blue) and last November (red) on that second plot though; this November just started really late. With all that said, this season did give us our 9th white Thanksgiving in a row here at the house. That’s the longest white Thanksgiving streak in our data set, and it now bumps the average/odds for white Thanksgiving here close to 80% by the numbers. In contrast to November, this December’s snowfall has been strong thus far. That immediately jumps out if you look at the blue line on either the first or second plot – it simply takes off after November 30th, and you can see how it crosses the 2023 red line and pulls well ahead of average snowfall pace (white dotted line). We had over 30 inches of snow here in the valley in just the first 10 days of December this year, and it’s easy math to see where the month would end up if snowfall stayed at that pace for 30+ days – that would take the top spot in my December records. Obviously, it’s hard to maintain that snowfall pace for an entire month as our most recent system shows, but the thing is, this December’s snowfall thus far came with no large storms – it was just that modest bread and butter pattern that the GFS showed as we talked about a week or two ago. We’ve had six storms during this season’s initial December stretch, and the largest was only 8.2 inches. Although not directly relevant to this season, the second plot really shows how December played out last season – snowfall just tanked after mid-month, and you can see that nearly flat red line that quickly dropped behind average snowfall pace. In just its first week, this December’s snowfall surpassed last December’s snowfall for the entire month. The third plot below has the cumulative snowfall data for our site for the past five seasons, since you were wondering how we are doing compared to other years. You can see that this season is actually outpacing all of the previous four after this early December run. So, if it’s felt like the first 10 days of December put on a good showing – the data say that they did. And again, that’s with no massive synoptic storms or stationary closed lows sitting to our northwest, just a steady diet of bread and butter. Bread and butter is just that, sort of the typical, staple pattern, so imagine if the mountains just simply had that for an entire season. And finally, the fourth plot below has all the data from my data set so that you can see where this season sits with respect to all the others. This season actually stands in a solid position (fourth overall) at this early stage, but the real big dogs are typically ones that couple together a solid November and December, and you can see those topping the chart. Anyway, the current ongoing precipitation has already changed over to snow here in the local mountains, and snow levels should be dropping to the valley floors over the next couple of hours, so we should continue tacking on to the current December snowfall numbers. For the local resorts, I’ve got the updates on their snowfall progress similar to what I posted a few days ago. Jay Peak is currently at 99 inches of snowfall on the season, so they’re running at 99”/54” = 183% of average snowfall pace. Bolton Valley is reporting 55 inches of snowfall on the season, so they’re running at 55”/49” = 112% of average snowfall pace. Jay Peak has dropped back a bit from where they were when I last checked, of course they were running around 200% of average, and it’s going to be incredibly hard to keep up a pace like that. Bolton has actually picked up their pace from the last update, since they were at 105%.

Between so much great skiing and being extra busy with work, I haven’t been able to keep up with mountain reports, but I’ve finally had a chance to put together the report on Sunday’s outing at Bolton. My older son and I headed up together for some turns, and since the resort has been offering lift-served skiing off Wilderness now, we decided to do some touring down at Timberline. With Timberline’s lower elevations, the snowpack wasn’t really reading for touring earlier in the season, but with day after day of snow during the week, and the depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake pushing 40 inches, the snowpack depths just continued to climb at all elevations. At our house at 500’ in the Winooski Valley, the snowpack had hit 14 inches, so we knew Timberline at 1,500’+ was more than ready to support some quality ski touring. Indeed, Timberline was ready for prime time – at least in terms of overall snowpack depth if not yet its subsurface base depths or the density gradient of the snowpack. Down around 1,500’ at the Timberline Base, the snowpack depth was 20 inches, so that was plenty of snow for skiing. But unlike much of the snowpack up at the main mountain, there wasn’t really any settled base below that snow. So, there was a bit less flexibility in terrain choice, assuming you wanted to ski reasonably safely or didn’t want to risk damaging equipment, but it’s more than enough coverage for the mowed/maintained trails. The only other issue with the snowpack was that the powder was of roughly equal density throughout its depth. It certainly wasn’t upside down, but without a density increase as you go down, skis are prone to sink quite far, and you can get bogged down or experience tip submersions. We’d both brought 115 mm fat skis, so that really helped to mitigate that issue in terms of overall floatation and the ability to have fun on any lower-angle terrain, but it’s something to consider when you’re choosing which equipment to use for an outing. We saw some folks out on snow surfers, and I bet these were fun with decent floatation as long as they were on slope of sufficient pitch. We got out in the morning because we knew that there was the chance for temperatures to go above freezing later in the day, but if temperatures did go above 32 F, it seemed to be just marginally. I’ve mentioned in some of my recent reports that we’ve needed a consolidation event for the snowpack in certain areas, so in that respect this warmer storm that came into the area today has been helpful, but getting an inch of liquid as dense snow would of course have been superior to getting it as rain. I can’t say if this will be a net gain for liquid in the snowpack down here at our site yet, but if it’s questionable here in the valley, it could easily be a liquid equivalent increase for some of the elevations. The mountains are expected to switch back over to snow shortly, and then the snow is supposed to work its way down in elevation over the next few hours, so we’ll have a chance to see how things settled out by tomorrow.

Alerts came out early this morning for our next Winter Weather Advisory – the current BTV NWS maps are below:

Bolton Valley started their lift-served ski season yesterday, and I headed up this afternoon for a few runs to check out the conditions and get some exercise. It’s becoming a bit hard to keep track of the snow that’s falling because it’s nearly continuous with all these bread-and-butter systems passing through the area, but the resort is reporting 14 inches of new snow in the past 48 hours. They have a very interesting assortment of lifts and trails available right now that is atypical of what they usually have going at the start of the season. The Snowflake Chair isn’t running, and Sherman’s Pass isn’t open, and those are often early season staples. Instead, the Wilderness Chair is running, and they appear to have the entirety of the Wilderness terrain open on natural snow. With neither Sherman’s Pass nor Bear Run open, there’s no beginner terrain currently being served off the Vista Quad or the Mid Mountain Chair, so the only beginner terrain is off the Mighty Mite. And, the only way down from the Vista Summit is Hard Luck, which is a steep black diamond run. It’s a very unusual collection of early season terrain. I decided to sample all the lifts that were available, and I started with a Beech Seal run off the Mid Mountain Chair. The skier’s left side had manmade snow, and the skier’s right was natural snow, and the quality was of course night and day. The right side was a little thin in a few spots, but the snow quality was excellent since it’s entirely natural snow that has never undergone a thaw-freeze cycle. I headed to Vista next, and Hard Luck was disastrous. Coverage was fantastic, but being all manmade snow, very steep, and the only way down from Vista such that it got all the skier traffic, the quality of the snow was horrible. I’m sure racers would love it, but that’s about it. I watched multiple people try to turn and simply kick out, fall, and begin to slide down the slope because there’s just nothing to hold onto with your skis. Thankfully, about halfway down you can cut over to the Show Off trail, which is currently all natural snow. The coverage is a little thin in spots, but easily manageable and all the snow there was excellent packed powder. There was lots of snowmaking going on with temperatures in the 20s F, so I’m sure they’ll be opening more of the traditional early season terrain soon.

I didn’t receive the usual text announcement, but apparently, we’re under a Winter Weather Advisory for this next Clipper coming into the area. The BTV NWS maps for this event are below:

I’ll try to find some time this weekend to put together my usual snowfall progression plot for our site – but it’s easier to get that done when the skiing isn’t as good. With a quick look though, Bolton Valley should be at roughly 38 inches of total snowfall as of today (12/6), and they are reporting 40 inches on the season, so they seem to be right around average or just slightly ahead (105% of average). Jay Peak should be at ~42 inches of total snowfall as of today, and their current season total is 83 inches, so they are way ahead of average pace. They’re essentially running at 200% of average snowfall, which is impressive for a place as snowy as Jay Peak. It really seems like it was that recent lake-effect period that hit them incredibly hard and pushed them so far ahead of the other resorts in the Northern Greens. The moisture stream just sat there for quite a while.

My older son was off from work yesterday, so the two of us decided to head up to Bolton for some turns. With the generally unconsolidated snowpack, it was a bit tough to tell how much new snow fell from the Clipper, but based on the resort’s snow report, it seemed like they picked up a few inches, similar to what we received down here in the valley. With today being their opening day, yesterday there was a lot of activity on the mountain as they made final preparations for opening. At the base, one of the patrollers asked if we could stay off Wilderness for touring and instead head over to the Nordic and backcountry network, so we were happy to oblige. Although there’s no snowmaking on Wilderness, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were going to potentially be doing some grooming and prep work like obstacle marking over there anyway, so I suspect they wanted to minimize skier traffic as much as they could. I wouldn’t normally have defaulted to touring on the Nordic and backcountry network at this stage of the early snowpack, since the Wilderness trails are just a safer bet for quality turns; they have been mowed and have a more substantiated base due to some skier traffic packing it down. But since I’ve been out on Wilderness for a few ski tours now this season, getting out onto the nearby backcountry terrain gave me a nice opportunity to compare the quality of the turns in both places. For overall skiing and powder turns, the experience was unquestionably better on piste at Wilderness. It’s not an issue of overall snow depth; snowpack depths were closing in on 20 inches when I was out for my ski tour on Tuesday, and that was before the Clipper and the cold front brought a lot more snow to the area over the past couple of day. The depth of the snowpack has gone up substantially at this point – as of today the depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake is at 30 inches. What’s needed off piste to really improve the quality of the skiing is some consolidation. There is some base snow in the snowpack below the fluff, and it’s a decent base for on piste turns, it’s just not enough to sufficiently cover the contours of your typical off-piste terrain yet. Although a storm with above-freezing temperatures isn’t going to be great for snow quality, it would help in that consolidation. Alternatively, a nice dense snowfall storm would also help, and of course that would be much better for snow surfaces in general. It would temporarily ruin the current dry powder and might give us a bit of an upside-down snowpack, but it would really help set things up long term. The only other alternative would be to continue to get the type of dry snow we’re getting and wait a while for settling over time as the lower layers get compressed. This just takes a lot longer and requires a lot of snow, going the route of a continental/Colorado type snowpack. It's not that the off-piste skiing is horrible, it’s just that you need to stick to places that have seen a bit of skier traffic, or you know are well manicured with minimal hazards underfoot.

It’s solid, but nothing outrageous for around here based on eyeballing the snowboards out back – if I had to guess it’s in the 0.5-1.0”/hr. range. I cleared the boards around 6:00 P.M. and there’s 1.5-2.0” on there now, so that would average in the ~0.5”/hr. range overall, but much of it has fallen in the past hour or so since things have picked up, so the current snowfall rate is above that. The radar has had some of that good look though where the echoes don’t push through the spine but instead keep regenerating along the western slopes.

I hadn’t been up to the mountain since Saturday, so I was eager to get out for a ski tour when I had time today. There’s been no specific synoptic storms in the area, but the snow has been piling up the thanks to the continuous feed of moisture off the Great Lakes and the upper-level low pressure to our north. Seeing the snowpack depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake quickly jump up to near 20 inches is a strong sign that it’s been snowing around here. Having that closed upper low over Hudson Bay with broad upper level troughing is a great setup when you have a 4,000’ wall of mountains sitting downwind of a moisture source like the Great Lakes. Even without data from the Mt. Mansfield stake to go on, I know it’s been snowing because we’ve recently had several inches of new snow down at our place in the valley, so the snow is hitting all elevations with the current temperature regime. Indeed, I found that snow depths were up substantially at all elevations during today’s tour. I toured again using the Wilderness Uphill Route, so I was able to check snowpack depths from the valley on up and compare them to what I’d last seen on Saturday. The updated snow depths are below, with Saturday’s depths listed first, then today’s depths following in bold. The depths I found up at 3,000’ and above are certainly consistent with what is being reported for the snowpack depths at the Mt. Mansfield stake. 340’: T-1: --> 1-2” 500’: 1” --> 2” 1,000’: 2” --> 3-4” 1,200’: 2-3” --> 4-5” 1,500’: 3” --> 6-8” 2,000’: 6-8” --> 8-12” 2,250’: 8-10” --> 10-14” 2,500’: 10-12” --> 12-16” 2,750’: 11-13” --> 14-17” 3,000’: 12-14” --> 16-18” Concomitant with the increasing depths, the quality of the powder skiing even jumped another notch relative to the already great conditions we experienced on Saturday. In fact, even though it’s excellent right-side-up powder that is beautifully dry, it’s getting deep enough that it’s starting to be a bit too much for the lowest angle slopes if you’re in fully untracked snow. I’d brought my 115 mm fat skis for today’s tour because they had already been a good choice on Saturday, but I was glad to have them for planing more efficiently on the lowest angle slopes today. Indeed, it was snowing today during my tour akin to what’s been happening for the past several days, but today’s snowfall was lighter and less consistent than what I experience on Friday or Saturday. Our next Clipper system is coming into the area though, so snowfall should pick up with that. We’re under a Winter Weather Advisory here along the spine of the Northern Greens, the latest BTV NWS Event Total Snowfall map currently has some areas of 8-12” and 12-18” shading.

I was recently alerted that we’ve been put under a Winter Weather Advisory for the next system coming through the area. Here along the spine of the Northern Greens, I see that the BTV NWS Event Total Snowfall map currently has some areas of 8-12” and 12-18” shading.

Nice, it’s great to see what Jay Peak can do with that lake moisture, even at that distance from Lake Ontario. It’s been fairly quiet around here this morning with respect to snowfall, but it’s picked up a bit now with the recent surge on the radar. I’d been seeing that feature that eduggs brought up, and it looked interesting; it’s not something we typically see with these as far as I know (the orientations of the moisture bands are typically more east to west vs. north to south), so I’m not sure if there is a specific cause, but we’ll see if the BTV NWS decides to mention it in their discussion at some point.