J.Spin

That's awesome - the snow really was excellent. Looks like you were over by the Nose!

PF has done a fantastic job of keeping everyone apprised of the snow conditions at Stowe, so for yesterday’s ski tour my wife and I decided to mix it up a bit and head to mighty Mt. Mansfield. On the approach to the resort, we found spotty snow cover in the valleys building to roughly 12-15” of snow at 1,640’ at the Midway Lodge. Yesterday was a simply beautiful November day, with temperatures a bit below freezing, little to no wind, and some peeks of sun to keep it bright and create excellent views but not throw out so much sun that it substantially affected the quality of the snow. Plenty of skiers and other winter enthusiasts were around at the resort as they took the opportunity to get out and enjoy the snow, but crowds certainly weren’t crazy – I didn’t see many cars in the Mansfield lot, and the Gondola parking lots certainly weren’t full. There were plenty of established skin tracks on the Gondola terrain, and there were typically double and triple tracks available. So it was very easy to ascend side-by-side and enjoy conversations, and you could conveniently pass people or let them pass you if need be. Snow depth increased to over 20” as we ascended, and the snow was substantial enough that it provided both excellent base snow and surface powder for skiing. I’d say it was denser snow overall than what we had back from that storm on the 5th, but the powder skiing was still quite good. We found that the snow did get a touch denser below 2,000’, so you had to be on top of your turns a little more in those elevations as you finished the descent. My younger son was going to head to Bolton for a tour yesterday, but I suggested that he pop over to Mansfield instead, since Stowe isn’t open for the season yet and it’s an excellent time to get in some turns there. We were able to meet up with him and a friend at the start of their tour, just as we were finishing ours. I passed along the info what we’d encountered with respect to snow conditions, and he said they had an excellent tour with some great turns that even brought them into the trees.

I haven’t done a valley snowfall update yet this season, but now that we’ve reached the middle of the month and the snows have been rolling along well in both the mountains and the valleys, it’s probably a decent time. Last season was certainly solid as a whole with over 200” of snow here in the valley, but November was actually one of the weak spots, at least in the lower elevations. We only had 4” of snow (the lowest November snowfall total in almost 10 years), which is well below average, and most of it came at the end of the month as we were moving into December (you can see how the blue line in the plot below compares to the dotted white line for average snowfall progression). This season (orange line in the plot is off to a solid, above-average start, but up to this point it hasn’t been in the league of seasons like 2019-2020 or 2020-2021. The valley snows this season did seem to hit quick and hard (I hadn’t even finished blowing the last few leaves off the lawn or put out the driveway marker poles), so I was curious to see where we stood with respect to snowpack. The current snowpack started up on the 11th of the month, which is on the early side, so I wondered where it would sit if it were to persist into the winter. It turns out that if it does persist, it wouldn’t be a record, since the continuous winter snowpack for the 2019-2020 season started on November 8th, and even the 2018-2019 season snowpack started on November 10th. The past five seasons have had more typical/average snowpack starts at the end of November/beginning of December, which probably gives the early feeling to this season. Part of what’s helped jumpstart this season was simply being in that zonal flow for a while this month with modest storms/clippers passing through the area. And it looks like temperatures for Morrisville have come in right around average for the first half of the month (departure of -0.1 F), which shows that even average November temperatures can produce some decent snows for both the mountains and the valleys. That got me thinking about the weather patterns around here. More and more, I’m seeing the value of these zonal patterns with respect to getting, and more importantly, keeping snow and retaining snow quality. Every year it becomes more apparent that highly amplified patterns are just so much riskier – you basically have this narrow window/slot of storm tracks where you can get some big storms, and an average of 50% of the time you risk a storm passing to the west and putting the area in the warm sector and damaging the snowpack. The discussions around here so often cast “zonal flow” as bad, annoying, unwanted, whatever, but if zonal/average flow is not good, then that’s essentially saying “average” weather is not good. That’s a scary statement with respect to an area’s winter/snow climatology if even “average” isn’t good enough – it would suggest that only a subset of weather patterns (probably well under 50%) are going to be decent, and more often than not you’re really just going to end up with something else.

I guess folks weren’t kidding about the potential for some additional snow. We were under a Winter Weather Advisory for the front end of this system, but I woke up to find that we’re now under a Winter Storm Warning as the storm continues. Even in the valley here, the BTV NWS point forecast suggests the potential for 6-12”+. Current maps from the BTV NWS are below, and it looks like they reeled in those areas of darker red 24-30” shading in the updated version of the Event Total Snow Accumulation map, but there are still substantial areas of 18-24” shading.

Our current winter storm began affecting the area yesterday, and it’s been hitting us with a decent stream of moisture in the form of snow and some rain/snow in the lower elevations. We picked up less than an inch of additional snow overnight at our site in the Winooski Valley, and the total precipitation Id recorded from the event was less than ¼” as of this morning’s CoCoRaHS submission. So, I had no idea that we’d been clobbered with snow in the higher elevations until I saw PF’s post of the accumulation at the Stowe snow cam. I immediately checked the Bolton Valley Base Area Webcam, and although I couldn’t get a good sense for how much snow had fallen there, the scene was solidly white, and in general if Stowe has done well with snowfall, then Bolton Valley has seen something similar. Snow cover was getting patchy this morning in many of the lower valleys, with marginal temperatures and a wet snow/rain mix, and that’s the way things stood at the base of the Bolton Valley Access Road when I headed up. Snow depths really started to pick up above 1,000’ though, and I found 6-9” of snow at the Timberline Base at 1,500’. Up in the Village at 2,000’, snow depths were in the 10-14” range, and there was steady moderate to heavy snowfall. I was able to tour up to the Wilderness Summit at ~3,150’, where I measured total snow depths in the 15-24” range. That’s not all from this current system of course, but with the existing snowpack below and this fresh snow on top, it’s set up some very nice skiing. Steep terrain is certainly in play with the amount of snow out there right now, and Bolton Outlaw was in really good shape. I was on mid-fats, since I wasn’t sure of how much snow there was going to be, but if I’d known just how much was out there, and how good the coverage was in general, I would have gone with fatter skis. At least on piste as of this morning, fats were the way to go. The powder out there isn’t quite as dry as what fell from the November 5th storm, but the quality is quite good, and it has a lot of substance to it. With underlying base in place and this new medium to high density snow on top of it, there is absolutely some great coverage out there. Below is the total snow depth profile I observed this morning for various elevations in the Bolton Valley area. As usual, it’s getting harder to probe the full depth of the snow in the higher elevations where the snowpack is becoming more consolidated. 340’: T-2”” 500’: 1-2” 1,000’: 2-4” 1,500’: 6-9” 2,000’: 10-14” 2,500’: 12-15” 3,000’: 15-24” It should be interesting to see where the snowpack depth comes in with the next update from the Mt. Mansfield Stake. This system looks like it should continue to deliver snow right through the end of the week, with 8-14” of additional snow shown in the forecasts. And, temperatures are expected to cool down a bit and bring snow levels back down to the lower valleys, so if the snow density drops it could set up some excellent right-side-up powder conditions.

I’ve had a chance to put together a few shots from Tuesday’s outing for that interesting storm that hit the lower valleys just about as much as the mountains, so I figured I’d follow up with those. I don’t think there are any major updates I need to make to my text report, except that I do recall there was a bit of a crust in the snowpack due to some mixed precipitation that fell at some point during the event. Thankfully, it was an interior layer because new snow had fallen on top of it, so it didn’t derail the turns like it might have had it been a surface crust. Any mixed precipitation is really buried now though – as PF noted, our current storm lit up the mountains last night with some very potent accumulations. I’ll report on that as soon as I can put some material together.

I had time for a quick ski tour up at Bolton today, so I can pass along a bit of beta with regard to this latest storm and conditions. I’d seen that with the warm front end of this storm, the snow had melted out in the lower elevations of the mountain, so the depths that are there now in the roughly 2,000’-2,500’ range are only from this latest event. Seeing that Jay Peak webcam image above that you posted, I’d say Bolton got hit just a bit better as you surmised – it’s probably similar to what Smugg’s saw. Here’s the elevation-based snow depth profile I observed this morning in the Bolton Valley area: 340’: 4” 500’: 4” 1,000’: 4” 1,200: 4” 1,500’: 4-5” 2,000’: 4-6” 2,500’: 4-6” 2,700’: 5-8” You can see what a weird snow depth profile that is compared to the usual – the snow depth even in the Village at ~2,000’ is basically that same as it is at 340’ at the base of the Bolton Valley Access Road or at our house at ~500’. I only had time to tour up to ~2,700’ this morning, but the snow depths don’t really start to increase until you get above ~2,500’ into the elevations that have pre-existing snowpack, so it looks like the snow accumulations from the front end of this system were pretty consistent over quite a broad range of elevations. In terms of the quality of the turns, today was more like the skiing from the Halloween/November 1st system vs. the much higher quality turns from the November 5th system. This snow was drier than the Halloween/November 1st system, so it skied better in that regard, but going with meadow skipping terrain was definitely the optimal choice for fun turns. The number of folks that I saw out touring today at the resort wasn’t outrageous – the top tier of Bolton’s Village parking area was ~1/3 full, but you could tell the ski touring activity was a bit livelier than the past couple of systems with the way the lower valleys got in some substantial accumulations. I’ll put together a bit more of a report with a few photos as soon as I get a chance.

We’d picked up about another 1½” of snow at our site this morning by the time I headed out, so being right along the spine in the Winooski Valley, we appeared to be getting in on a bit of that blocked flow as often happens. You can definitely see those echoes sneaking through the Winooski Valley on the radar image.

Over in the Adirondacks they’ve already had some advisories from one of our recent storm systems, but I think these are the first notable winter weather alerts over on this side of the lake. I’m seeing a lot of 2-4” snowfall forecasts for the valleys around here in the Chittenden County area on the west side of the Greens, and the shading on the projected accumulations map seems in line with that, but the projections increase as you head north toward the international border. The current BTV NWS maps are below.

That’s very interesting. I didn’t specifically recall those two snowstorms, so I went to my data, and I can see why – they were definitely not the 2 biggest snowstorms of the season over here at our site. They were both fairly small, and well down in the hierarchy of the 61 storms on the season – they weren’t part of the top 10, and they didn’t even make the top 20. The 11/28-29 snowstorm (potent low pressure tracking across southern New England) brought 2.3 inches of snow and ranked 29th, and the 12/4-5 snowstorm (Clipper system racing eastward from southwestern Quebec to northern Maine) brought 2.9 inches of snow and ranked 23rd. It’s always amazing how two NNE sites at similar latitudes can have such different winter regimes. The largest snowstorms of the season over here were in January and February, and in terms of the 24-25 winter as a whole, most skiers/mountain recreation types in this area would probably take a repeat if push came to shove. It wasn’t a perfect winter, with a fairly weak November in the lower elevations and a relatively slow period leading into the first half of December and again near the holidays, but with all the local ski resorts in the Northern Greens ultimately recording 350”+ of snow and Jay Peak hitting 475”, combined with a very stable period in midwinter without any huge rainstorms, it was a solid performer.

That’s a great point PF. I hadn’t thought too much about it because we certainly get snowpack and skiing like this in November, but probably not too often in this part of November. Especially at this time of the season, that average snow depth at the stake is quite the “average” vs “typical”. Periods like this are the counterpoint to all those early Novembers when the pattern is just benign, pleasant, stick season weather, which happens quite often. Those videos coming out of Jay Peak definitely show how good some of the riding has been – one of my students was showing me video yesterday as he wondered why in the world he wasn’t out there: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQuj2viEr4X/

The clipper system affecting the area yesterday into today dropped another round of snow in the mountains and we even saw snow transiently accumulating in some of the lower valleys. This system was similar to the last one that affected the area on Friday into Saturday, but temperatures seemed to be a bit colder on the back side this time around. This morning when I checked the view on Bolton Valley’s Base Lodge Webcam, the accumulations appeared to be a bit more robust than last time around. Seeing hat, I knew there would be plenty of snow for using skins right from he base, so I geared up for a ski tour and headed up to the mountain. While the snow line was still fairly high with this system, the local ~2,000’ peaks around us in the Winooski Valley were coated with white for their top ~300’ of vertical, so that suggested that the snow level had dipped just a bit lower than what we’d seen over the weekend. Heading up the Bolton Valley Access Road, I saw the first traces of snow around 1,200’ just like Saturday, but Timberline showed a decent covering down to its 1,500’ base, and up in the Village at 2,000’ I found 3-6” of snow, which was more than what had accumulated Saturday morning. Temperatures were cooler today than they were on Saturday, and even at 2,000’ the temperatures were easily below freezing. The cooler temperatures meant that the powder was of much higher quality than what’s we’d seen over the weekend, and with some base snow already in place, the quality of the powder skiing took a big leap forward from where it had been. Compared to what was available on Saturday, today was simply easy breezy midwinter-style powder skiing. All you had to do was lean in and carve. When checking snow depths today, I couldn’t really differentiate the new snow from the old snow that was already present from the last system, but the updated elevation-based snow profile is below. In the list, the first depth values are what I found on Saturday, and the second depth values are what I observed today. Nov 1 --> Nov 6 1,000’: 0” --> 0” 1,200: T” --> T 1,500’: T-1” --> 1” 2,000’: 1-4” --> 3-6” 2,500’: 4-6” --> 5-9” 2,800’: 7-11” --> 9-12” 3,150’: 7-11” --> 10-16” With every one of these storms that passes through and drops snow, the potential increases for this to be the start of the winter snowpack. With typical November temperatures, I wouldn’t expect the higher elevation snow to melt too quickly, so we’ll just have to see if there are any warm spells or big rainy systems in the future that might be able to put a dent in the snowpack.

The BTV NWS has been going with about half those amounts in their past couple of updates, but you can see they’re using the “For now” qualifier in their wording, so they’ll get a bit more aggressive as we get closer if need be. Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Burlington VT 636 PM EST Tue Nov 4 2025 .SHORT TERM /WEDNESDAY NIGHT THROUGH THURSDAY/... Snow level should lower 1500ft agl by Thursday morning. For now, the forecast shows a slushy dusting to a inch around 1500ft, 1 to 3 inches from 2000 to 3000 ft, and 3 to 5 at summit level at Mt. Mansfield and Jay Peak. Either way, it should be another round of snow on top of what’s there from the weekend system. The Friday/Saturday system continues to look like the warmest of the lot with less opportunity for snow, but they are already talking about the Sunday/Monday system as having the potential for snow down to the lower valleys, so certainly an opportunity for more accumulation. .LONG TERM /THURSDAY NIGHT THROUGH TUESDAY/... The next system for Sunday-Sunday night looks like the more interesting one for snow lovers as a rain to snow event is possible as a longwave trough develops with its axis over the Great Lakes region.

It certainly wasn’t our deepest early season dump by any means, but the snow is reasonably dense as you mentioned, and thus far it’s had plenty of staying power. I was watching The Weather Channel this morning, and they had the Sugarbush Gate House Plaza View Webcam playing on the side of the screen during one of their segments as they often do – I was surprised to see how low the snow line was on Spring Fling. Since the base area there is just a bit below 1,500’, that snow on Spring Fling looks like it’s persisting below 2,000’, and it’s obviously even more substantial higher up as the still image below shows. A quick run through the GFS shows a pattern that looks pretty similar to what it was depicting a few days ago, with approximately 6 storms in the queue out through roughly the 19th of the month. They would all have some snow potential to varying degrees. This morning on TWC, Jim Cantore walked through the modeling for the next week in our area and talked about the systems. That Friday/Saturday system looks like it’s the warmest, with the least snow potential, but the BTV NWS is talking about the general pattern in their discussion – you can tell they see the queue of potential storms as well with the wording ”No less than 3 discrete systems are on track to cross the region during the period…”: Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Burlington VT 147 PM EST Mon Nov 3 2025 LONG TERM /THURSDAY THROUGH MONDAY/... As of 138 PM EST Monday...As mentioned last night, our area remains in an active weather pattern in the late week time frame as the mean core of the northern stream westerlies continue their seasonal migration southward into the northern tier of the country. No less than 3 discrete systems are on track to cross the region during the period, the first coming Wed/Wed night, with the others swinging through Friday/Friday night and again by next Sunday/Sunday night. The general idea is to run with higher, 60-90% precipitation probabilities with each system, the dominant p-type falling largely as rain in the lower elevations. A mix of rains/wet snows at elevation is more likely on the back side of these features, especially Wednesday night and potentially by next Sunday night as deeper meridional troughing digs across the eastern third of the CONUS. Temperatures to remain seasonably cool through the period, with diurnal variation somewhat tempered by an abundance of typical November cloud cover. Now that we’re into November, we’re hitting the point where “seasonable” means snow, so all these systems should be of potential interest. With the recent snowfall persisting at various elevations, the active pattern, and no huge systems expected to go barreling up through the Great Lakes to our west, it got me wondering about the start of the winter snowpack. I knew we were a bit on the early side to start the snowpack, so I went to the data to see what the actual numbers said. With the available data from 68 seasons, the mean start date for the Mt. Mansfield snowpack is 11/16, with the median date at 11/15, the mode at 11/18, and the S.D. at 14.5 days. So if the snows from Oct 31/Nov 1 were to persist, it wouldn’t be all that unusual. The snowpack should start by November 1st in about 15% of seasons. I was surprised to find that the snowpack actually starts in October in roughly 13% of seasons. It’s also interesting to note that the past three seasons have helped push the median start date for the start of the continuous snowpack on Mt. Mansfield forward in time. The past three seasons have had very respectable start dates for the Mansfield snowpack (11/14/22, 10/30/23, and 11/12/24), which represent start dates of 2, 17, and 4 days ahead of the mean, respectively. Obviously the 10/30/23 start date was the heavy hitter here with respect to any movement in the mean. The addition of those dates didn’t budge the mean start date from where it was at 11/16, but they did move the median from 11/16 up a day to 11/15. It’s far from a “lock” that the recent snow we’ve had would be the start of the snowpack for the season (who knows what will happen with these upcoming storms, and what will go on in later November and December), but the current situation is such that it will be interesting to watch and see how it plays out. I guess I hadn’t noticed it before, but when averaged out as shown by the black line in Matt Parrilla’s plot below, the “average” snowpack start is back in mid to late October. Those data average out all the starts and stops that the snowpack has in a real year though, so that’s where you get the difference in that ~10/22 snowpack start vs. the actual 11/16 mean for the start of the continuous snowpack.

As forecast, the snow levels with this most recent storm began to drop yesterday evening, and the higher elevations picked up some decent snow accumulations by morning. The views from Bolton’s Base Lodge Webcam seemed to suggest just an inch or two of accumulation at 2,000’, and their Vista Summit Webcam was covered in snow, but the Allyn’s Lodge Snow Stake Cam at Sugarbush suggested that there were some decent accumulations around 3,000’. So, I decided to head up to Bolton Valley to at least get in a hike in the snow and check out the actual accumulations in person. The snow levels with this storm definitely didn’t make it down to the lower valleys, and even the local 2,000’ peaks surrounding the Winooski Valley in this area didn’t seem to have any visible accumulations. Those observations left me wondering just how high the snow levels had been, but it was clear as I ascended the Bolton Valley Access Road that the spine of the Greens had done better than some of the other surrounding areas. On my ascent toward Bolton Valley, I saw the first traces of snow around 1,200’, and up at the main base at 2,000’, accumulations were definitely more substantial than what the webcam had suggested. There was plenty of wind with this storm, and while exposed areas may have only accumulated an inch or two of snow, areas out of the wind held 3 to 4 inches of dense coverage. I started hiking the Wilderness Uphill Route with my skis on my pack, but within a couple of minutes I pulled out my skins and started skinning. It was clear that there was more than enough coverage to be skinning instead of walking if you wanted to, and there was a skin track in place as well. Accumulations increased all the way up to near the 3,000’ elevation range, but much like what the Sugarbush webcams had shown, where the 3,125’ stake had 5 inches of snow and the 3,900’ stake showed less than an inch of snow, accumulations sort of fell off as you hit the ridgelines above 3,000’. It must have been those winds – they really pounded and scoured the upper elevations relative to those middle elevations. Here's the snow accumulations profile I observed today in the Bolton Valley area during my tour in the midday period: 1,000’: 0” 1,200: T” 1,500’: T-1” 2,000’: 1-4” 2,500’: 4-6” 3,000’: 7-11” The forecast today suggested that at above 2,000’ the temperature was never going to go above freezing, and I’d say that’s what I observed. The temperature at 2,000’ was right around freezing and the snow there was a bit denser and softer, then in the middle elevations it was denser and colder with some upside-down consistency, and them up around 3,000’ the temperatures were well below freezing and the snow was notably drier. It was still on the denser side, but it didn’t have that upside-down feeling of the middle elevations and turns were easier. When I finished my ski tour and got back to my car, I saw that I’d missed a call from my younger son, so I called him back and he said that he and his crew from UVM were just at the base of the access road on their way up. So, I hung out for a bit, met them when they arrived at the base, and gave them the beta on everything I’d found on my tour. They subsequently had quite a fun tour of their own based on the video footage I saw later when they swung by the house, so it was great to see that everyone had a safe outing, and they kicked off their ski season with style!

Indeed – he was there getting pictures of his bike in the snow when I was checking the cam for accumulations this morning, so I had to grab a still with him in it. It’s such a great Vermont change of seasons vibe, and you can’t help but imagine him in that pose standing there going “Huh.” It’s so on point though – I literary changed out my bike rack for my ski rack on the car today before I headed up to the hill.

There’s nothing visible on the Bolton Valley Vista Peak Cam yet because it’s still covered in snow, but at a roughly equivalent elevation of 3,125’ at Sugarbush, it looks like about 5 inches of accumulation on the Allyn’s Lodge Snow Stake Cam. In line with what PF was saying with respect to the winds, there’s actually less accumulation on the Heaven’s Gate Snow Stake Cam at 3,900’.

From the Bolton Valley Main Base Live Cam view this morning, it looks like they picked up an inch or two around the 2,100’ elevation from this storm. The summit cam looks like it’s covered in snow, so no views from up there yet.

Well, if the NNE Cold Season thread is back, then we really must be moving into snow season. I know we had those first snows back about a week ago, but it’s been fun to see some of the comments from the BTV NWS crew as this next event has approached. You could really feel some of the “pro snow” mentality in yesterday’s discussion: Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Burlington VT 216 PM EDT Thu Oct 30 2025 NEAR TERM /THROUGH FRIDAY/... Trends have been our friend if you are looking for snowfall with changeover occurring in the central/northern Greens btwn 8 PM and 11 PM Friday evening. Snow level look to drop to around 1000 feet by 12z Sat, as progged 925mb temps drop btwn -2C and -3C, while progged 850mb temps are in the -3C to -5C. The ingredients look favorable for a period of upslope rain and snow showers on Friday night with good 850 to 700mb rh >80%, strong 850mb winds of 35 to 45 knots, and moderately strong caa. This wl help to enhance precip with highest pops/qpf acrs the favorable upslope areas of northern Dacks and central/northern Greens. Snow accumulations range from dusting to 2 inches btwn 1000 and 2000 feet and 1 to 3 inches btwn 2000 and 3500 feet and up to 4 or 5 inches above 3500 feet by mid morning Sat. I have tried to highlight this thinking in the latest storm total snow grids. Did utilize the NAM3KM hourly temps in grids to show cooler air moving into the area faster, especially acrs the higher trrn on Friday evening. SHORT TERM /FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY NIGHT/... As of 216 PM EDT Thursday...Upslope rain and snow showers wl slowly taper off on Sat with blustery and chilly conditions prevailing. Highs generally in the mid 30s to mid 40s, except only upper 20s summits. Could we see the guns fire atop Killington this weekend? Otherwise a general drying trend is anticipated by Sat night with lows back in the lower 20s to mid 30s. Actually, after a really pleasant stretch of fall through much of September and October, it looks like we’ve had quite a shift in the level of weather activity in this last third of the month. Here at our site there’s been rain on 10 out of the last 12 days, and it pushed us past 5 inches of liquid for October. That’s still a bit below average, but it’s definitely a shift from earlier in the fall. The pattern looks like it continues to be active well into November. If one includes this current storm, a quick run through the GFS and other medium-range models out through mid-month shows 7 to 8 systems coming through the area, and all of them have the potential to offer some snow. It’s not especially cold for November, but those 850 mb temperatures spend plenty of time at or below 32 F. It looks like a lot of systems scooting through in the northern stream, and we know what that means around here.

Indeed Tony’s great with this stuff. He’s retired from his regular work, but as I believe PF knows, Tony was involved in actuarial science, so all the statistics stuff is right up his alley. One of the cool aspects of his material at bestsnow.net is where he built models for percent chances of a powder day (which he chose to define as 6”+ of snow, but he also ran numbers for 12”+ of snow) using just monthly snow totals and the associated frequency of meeting the required snowfall threshold. He has a page describing that methodology: https://bestsnow.net/pwdrpct.htm An interesting note is that although this past ski season wasn’t outrageously high with respect to its overall score as I discussed in my previous post, it was quite high on the powder day scale. This 2024-2025 season had 18% for its powder score, which is second only to the 2000-2001 season’s 21% powder score. Those numbers suggest that on average, 1 in every 5 days was a powder day. Since the modeling is based on monthly snowfall data, this season’s strong powder score must come from some decent monthly snow totals distributed throughout the season.

With the conclusion of the lift-served ski season around here, I put together the north to south list of available 2024-2025 snow totals for the Vermont ski areas: Jay Peak: 475” Burke: 176” Smuggler’s Notch: 368” Stowe: 362” Bolton Valley: 375” Mad River Glen: 248” Sugarbush: 281” Pico: 233” Killington: 252” Okemo: 138” Bromley: 168” Magic Mountain: 127” Stratton: 166” Mount Snow: 145” The resorts along the spine of the Northern Greens all reported 350”+ of snowfall on the season, with Jay Peak approaching 500”, so it was certainly a solid performance up here. It looks like snowfall totals were in the 200”-300” range for the Central Greens, which is probably in the decent/average range, and then season totals were in the ~150” range for the Southern Greens. It’s a bit tougher to find season totals for ski areas in other parts of the Northeast, but I did find that Whiteface reported 191” on the season, Cannon reported 174”, and Sugarloaf reported 167”. Many resorts either don’t post their season snowfall total or don’t have it available once they switch the website to summer mode, but everything else I found in a quick search had totals <150”: Wildcat 113”, Attitash 84”, Mount Sunapee 68”, Crotched Mountain 59”. There may be some areas out in the western New York lake-effect zones that had some decent season snowfall totals, but nothing popped up in a quick online search Along with all his data on resorts in the western U.S., Tony Crocker’s website has a specific page for scoring the quality of the ski season in the northern half of Vermont. I put together the powder-adjusted scores for the A-tier ski seasons over the past couple of decades to put in perspective where this past season sits. In the list below, the first number is the overall powder-adjusted season score, and the number in parentheses is the number of A-tier weekends. This past season was around the middle of that pack with respect to its score, and it’s not too surprising that those other three snowfall seasons for which I’d been plotting our site’s snowfall data for comparison (plot posted below) are all in the list as well. All three of those seasons beat this past season in terms of overall ski season score though, with 2007-2008 being the standout. In terms of A-tier weekends, this past season did seem to punch a bit above its weight with 9 of them, and that’s clearly a nod to that stretch of winter weather consistency from the beginning of January right through the beginning of March. In Tony’s full table, you can clearly see all 9 of those A-tier weekends stacked together as a solid block during that period. 2000-2001: 70 (13) 2007-2008: 62 (9) 2014-2015: 56 (11) 2010-2011: 56 (10) 2002-2003: 54 (7) 2018-2019: 54 (8) 2024-2025: 49 (9) 2012-2013: 47 (7) 2013-2014: 47 (7) 2017-2018: 46 (7) 2016-2017: 46 (7) Looking at Tony’s full table of Vermont snow conditions, it was interesting to note that this past season was the first A-level ski season in quite a while – that stretch of five seasons prior to this one is actually the longest period in his records without an A-level result. Checking the snowfall data for my site, it’s not that snowfall was really all that low during those seasons (the mean snowfall for that stretch was within 5% of average), but presumably the winter weather consistency just wasn’t there for A-level status to be obtained. Using the snowfall data for our site as a reference point, A-level ski seasons can certainly be achieved even with snowfall dipping as low as ~10% below average, as revealed by the 2012-2013, 2013-2014, and 2014-2015 seasons. So, consistency in wintry temperatures can apparently go quite a long way. If you can combine both decent snowfall and solid temperature consistency, that’s when you get into some of those really high scoring seasons.

…and then December just continued to deliver.

The winter/ski seasons all blur together for me, which I think is in part due to our climate here in the Northern Greens. While we certainly get memorable storms, the majority of the winter features day after day with light to moderate snowfall events, which don’t stand out as easily from one season to the next. In any case, it’s a good climate to maintain high-quality snow surfaces for skiing and riding, and it’s one of the reasons that I really like having the reports from my ski outings to refresh my memory for specific periods though. I was curious about that strong start you mentioned for the 2023-2024 season, and indeed it does pop up on the plot for the Mt. Mansfield Stake data – the snowpack depth hitting 40 inches in the first half of December is a great place to be, and it quickly gets a lot of off-piste terrain in play. I checked my snowfall numbers and saw that our site in the valley only picked up about a foot of snow in the first half of December, which is below average and certainly not a standout performance. After looking a little closer, I realized that November 2023 also brought us 20 inches of snow in the valley, and that was a big help in priming that great start to December. I hadn’t caught that the first big rise in the 2023-2024 snowpack plot is actually from the end of November, but I see in my data that we had 6 snowstorms in the valley in the last 10 days of the month. On my Bolton outing on the 28th I measured the snowpack depth at 20” at 3,000’ and then on the 29th it was up to 24”. The skiing was great even before the calendar hit December.