J.Spin

Wouldn’t Phin tell people to just get over it and move north though? – that’s literally what he did. Then every winter can be a “big winter”. Up by him, even a mediocre winter is darned wintry relative to most of the country. Decent snowpack for the entire winter is almost a given. He’s shown that it can be done.

I’ll still put my skis on my pack and hike to the snow line… if I have the beta and know there’s a couple feet of bomber snow up high. Having to hike a bit in the lower elevations is worth it if you know you’re heading for nearly midwinter conditions where you don’t even have to worry about the subsurface. In addition, hiking in Tele boots is quite pleasant, since they're just like a very supportive hiking boot. So when the difference between just going up for a hike vs. having the option for turns is just a couple of relatively light skis on my pack, it tips the balance a bit more. In general, I’m in the same camp as you. If you can’t skin right from the base, that immediately puts into question the potential quality of the skiing up high (or how high I’m going to have to go to get to good snow). You have to have quite an accumulation gradient up there somewhere to go from nothing to excellent in the early season when there’s no existing base in place. In the spring when there’s plenty of existing base, and the weather is beautiful, the calculation can be a bit different.

Ah… that latest round of snow passed through and Mansfield is visible again:

With the cloud level this morning, options to get an idea of the accumulating snow line were limited unless you were actually going to head up to elevation. The clouds have been rising at times as of midday though, and the snow line seems to be in the 3,000’ – 3,500’ elevation range. Bolton Mountain at ~3,700’ seems to have a few hundred vertical of snow visible, so that’s been serving as a good reference point. The views of the new snow have been great, although Mt. Mansfield recently disappeared again as moisture moved in from the northwest and snow began to drop. It sure looked like snowfall vs. rain, but I checked to see the temperature has been 31-32 F up there along the ridgeline, so it’s certainly snow. When the leaves are mostly down in the mountains and you see radar like this, it’s definitely starting to feel like the season around here:

As we look toward the beginning of next week, that potential intrusion of colder air has been shown on the GFS and other models for quite a while – and flakes are starting to appear in the Mansfield forecast now. Don’t worry though; the forecasters in the subforum have assured us that the leaves will remain on the trees (I’m sure PF’s picture is “Photoshopped”) and there will be no chances for snow at any elevation anywhere in the Northeast through the end of the month.

Very cool Tamarack, thanks for running that analysis. I’m immediately surprised that the snowfall difference between Novembers with above normal temperatures, and all Novembers is only 2.1” of snow. With November temperatures being somewhat marginal, I would have thought those above average temperature Novembers would be a collection of more obvious clunkers. I guess all it takes is probably a colder snap or two with some snowfall to get some accumulations down, even if the overall month comes out on the positive side for temperatures.

Great comments PF. We had this conversation several years back as well, perhaps in the NNE thread. I assume it’s from a period where color film predominated that the concept of a “native” or “unadjusted” photo being some sort of best representation of “reality” came into existence. Did people do this back in the days of black and white film? I have a hard time imagining the conversations of people going back and forth, with the black and film photographer insisting that his/her images were more realistic vs. the person who was attempting some sort of colorization. Really? Your eyes don’t see in color? Weird. It’s the same thing with color film. That someone is going to believe that an arbitrary synthetic film made by one company is any better of an “unaltered” representation of reality than someone else’s film just doesn’t make much sense. It’s all artificial. If you’re not post-processing your images, you’re just insisting on being stuck with whatever settings the film producer or camera maker decided to be their default settings, and they can make that whatever they want. One is not necessarily any more real than the next (i.e. you don’t know, objectively, what the world looks like through the eyes of other humans in terms of colors, saturation, dynamic range, etc.). Insisting on not post-processing just means you’re stuck with whatever drab, or oversaturated, or improperly color balanced, or over-sharpened, or blurry, or grainy, or whatever, settings that camera maker or film maker decided they wanted to be that default. There’s no way to have an unprocessed image – the image doesn’t exist before it’s processed. Even if you shoot digital in RAW, you still have to process it to an image format to make the viewable image. If you’re taking jpeg images out of your camera, they’re already processed with whatever defaults the camera has for processing, so you can’t avoid it. All one has to do is set the in-camera processing to make pictures as over-sharpened, over-brightened, and radioactively color saturated as they want, then post them or print them and tout how they came right out of the camera with no “post-processing”. Every scene is different with respect to lighting, coloring, dynamic range, etc., so limiting oneself to not post-processing is, ironically, the best way to ensure that you’ll almost never get images that are close to some sort of “reality”. In the end though… it’s a photograph. It’s not reality. It’s a representation of a scene. It’s art. It’s subjective. There are no actual standards.

Are the snowfall numbers applied in this analysis for the entire season, or for only the post-November portion of the season? I think we’ve talked about it before in the NNE thread, but one has to be more careful in correlating November data with winter up north, or it can just become a self-fulfilling hypothesis/comparison. November farther north, and especially in the mountains, isn’t quite the potentially uncorrelated/insignificant “pre-season” that it might be in areas to the south; in much of NNE you’re essentially “in-season” by that point. With November being at the edge of the season the way it is, above average temperatures are going to have a strong correlation with little to no snowfall. Average November snowfall at our site is almost 10% of the seasonal snowfall, so it’s not the minor/insignificant percentage represented by October snowfall. If you cut out 10% of a season’s snowfall through warm Novembers, then indeed, even if all else is equal for the rest of the season, one would expect those seasons with warm Novembers to average less overall snowfall. I’m not sure what % of Farmington’s average snowfall comes in November, but if the comparison is to full season snowfall, it would probably alter the threshold for significance vs. the assumption that the November temperatures and season’s snowfall have the possibility of being entirely independent.

Agreed; it’s going to be interesting to see when we start to get those initial touches of winter. An October with below average temperatures is fine because it typically offers the potential of getting a few days in on early snow, but an above average October is also great, since it can produce some days with perfect weather for outdoor activities. It’s rare for October snow/cold to carry right into the start of the actual season without a lapse, although it has happened when the cold comes at the very end of the month. November is a different animal though, in that a cold start there can easily mean the real beginning of the winter season.

Haven’t we just had five seasons in a row of Novembers with average to above average snowfall though? We’ve also had a couple of ridiculously early starts to the winter snowpack (as in early November in the valleys) during that stretch as well. I can’t speak specifically to the temperatures, but they can’t have been that horrible if they produced snowfall and insane valley snowpack starts like that. Looking at my data, there hasn’t been a dud November (e.g. ’15-‘16, ‘10-‘11, ‘09-‘10, ‘06-‘07, etc.) in years, so it’s been quite an incredible run. I’m just not sure how much better we can expect the month to be than what we’ve recently seen; a poor November is probably going to be a shock to the system after the run we’ve been on over these past several years.

I suspect that ± 15% you’re mentioning is probably in the range of what 1 σ is for our area. Unfortunately, that highly anomalous 2015-2016 season, with its -2.38 σ deviation in snowfall still throws quite a wrench into a relatively small data set of just 15 seasons. So 1 σ is at 22.5% in the data set currently, but it keeps being whittled away by ~1% per year as the more “typical” seasons stack up. It was actually up in the 26-27% range after that season first hit. If that anomalous season is omitted, 1 σ is at 16.9% for the data set. Assuming that lower variance is closer to reality, the blockbuster-style years of 200”+ of snowfall are going to be relatively infrequent (only about once a decade or so), but ~70% of seasons at our site should be in the 135” – 190” range.

That view is probably going to be incredible when the leaves start to change to some autumn colors. I heard everything across the region (or is that country?) is unquestionably 2 to 3 weeks behind average pace, case closed, mic drop, peace out, greatest ever, sliced bread, etc., etc., etc. Fall foliage in that elevation range should be stellar by the end of the month when the colors finally start to pick up.

After I saw the map, I checked the CoCoRaHS liquid data for our site to see if what was plotted was a good representation for our area. We’re right in that strip of yellow along the spine of the Central/Northern Greens (specifically on the county line right where it bumps out above the “M” in Montpelier). That yellow shading represents the 8-10” range for liquid, and our data indicate 9.00” on the nose for that period at our site, so for that spot check, the map looks right on. That’s probably about average rainfall for our site during that period. A total of ~9” for that roughly two-month stretch would equate to ~54” for a year, which is just about what we seem to have for our annual liquid average. We do have some rainfall peaks in our data in June and October, but what we saw over those 60 days would certainly be an average representation on an annual scale.

It seems like it’s been pouring for hours, so I happened to check the radar and immediately LOLed at what I saw. That flow is shooting right through the Winooski gap in the spine as we often see. It’s actually felt quite raw today, almost like one of those days where it’s pouring in the valleys, but you can pop up to the hill for some fresh turns because it’s pounding at elevation. The temperatures aren’t actually down at those levels yet, but it sort of feels that way because we’re somewhat acclimated to warm season temps. It’s October though, so it could happen literally any day now.

The “Meh” seems appropriate, or maybe a “LOL” would be the right response. That initial “joke” comment was probably an impromptu remark for some sort of dramatic effect, but it definitely smacks of both arrogance and parochialism. It’s essentially writing off the vast majority of ski areas in the country as “a joke”. The top tier resorts in Central, and especially Northern Vermont easily compare head-to-head with the mid-tier resorts in the Rockies and throughout the west in terms of snowfall, terrain, amenities, infrastructure, etc., etc. People are out of touch with reality if they think that skiing out west is all Whistlers, Altas, and Squaw Valleys. But that’s the sort of stuff people see on their vacations, that’s where the “big” terrain is, and those are the spots that get all the hype. After years of living and skiing in the Northern Rockies on what is known as some of the best “cold smoke” snow in the country, I wouldn’t have moved back to NVT if I felt the skiing wasn’t on par with the typical skiing out there. As they seem to say in the forum, “some know, some don’t”, but for those that do know, I’m not sure how they can see PF’s reports and pictures, day after day throughout the season, and not realize the quality of the skiing on even a national scale. I’ll be sure to remind all my friends in Montana that if they’re not skiing at Big Sky or maybe Bridger, that they’re wasting their time because the other dozen or so great ski areas in the state are just a big "joke".

Oh man, I love them too. It was so exciting when even Bolton added them a few years back. There’s no more fumbling about trying to get your season’s pass out to show the ticket attendant; you just walk right up, go through the gate, and off you go. It’s so fantastic on storm days when you don’t have to deal with taking your gloves off, trying to find your pass, sitting there getting your hands wet and cold in the pounding snow. Then you’re trying to shove everything back in your pocket before you load on the lift, etc. It seems great from the resort’s perspective as well – they really don’t need anyone checking tickets at the lifts, and that has to be a great savings on the number of lift employees you’re paying. Most of the time at Bolton’s lifts there’s just the lift attendant to help you load and that’s it, although they do seem to have a roaming associate or two that circulate among some of the larger lifts to give it a bit more of a personal touch, manage the gating for traffic flow, etc. At a low-key place like Bolton where there are rarely lift queues, it really seems to run smoothly. People just stroll up to the lifts and essentially “check their own tickets” and hop on. Oh, and for kids that are having issues with getting their RFID pass in the detection zone, I recommend getting them a shell with an arm/shoulder pocket and putting the pass in there. That’s already putting the pass in an elevated, exposed spot, and then it’s easy to move one’s arm around to raise/lower the pass if you need to get it higher into the RFID detection zone.

Yes, definitely; somewhere down in the valley behind that tallest tree in the shot.

I checked my CoCoRaHS numbers and found 50.46” of liquid for the 365-day period. That’s less than 10% below average, and seems very consistent with what the map shows for our area.

I was leaving my office, looked out toward the Greens, and was struck by what I saw. You’ve got clouds in the 3,500’ – 4,000’ elevation range skimming along the summits, and for the first time in a while, the clouds have some of that “cold season” look. I see temperatures in the 40s F and winds near 40 F as well, so that makes sense.

Everyone gets sick of excessive heat and humidity as they get older; I see them talking about it all the time in our main subforum threads. With age, it just gets harder to handle extremes like that.

For January snowfall days, the data show that last season was quite impressive among the data set. It’s interesting because both total snowfall (41.0”) and number of storms (12) were rather average this past January, but boy did it snow for “days and days and days”. January is a long month with 31 days, and to get snow on 29 of them is well above the mean as the plot shows. Recording snow on 29 days of a month is actually the highest I see in my records, so that’s another feather in the cap of winter 2020-2021, which generally felt like an “average at best” type of season.

The November data for days with snowfall definitely prompted some great discussion, and brought to light how good November 2018 was around here. Next up in the progression is December, and while this past December was certainly lean on total snowfall, the data show that it was solid with respect to days with snow. Overall, the plot suggest that December is actually quite the dependable month in terms of snowfall days, with 2/3 of the month delivering new snow on average. That means the wintry vibe should generally be there, which is appreciated by visitors as the ski and holiday seasons build. December definitely represents a bump up from November, where the average is just over 1/3 of the month for days with snowfall. …and then of course there’s good ol’ 2015-2016 that everyone talks about, sticking out like a sore thumb!

Now you’re getting it. That’s why you want to winter in a place where there’s always snow. Based on the yearly schedule Phin seems to be following, he definitely gets it. Most of us up here in NNE are here because of the snow, not because we have some strange obsession with wanting to freeze our azzes off. I did have to include that “most” qualifier though… because I’m sure they’re out there.

I was thinking back on this conversation where we were trying to figure out the annual snowfall average for your place at Jay Peak. I’d totally forgotten about the co-op there, since it’s been out of commission for so long. That co-op is literally a representation of your back yard, so I think we can thank Tamarack for getting you a hard number on your annual snowfall average. Our estimates were certainly decent though.

I’d forgotten about that Jay Peak co-op site, so thanks for bringing it up. I’ve always found that the data from that site simply reinforce the season snowfall totals from Jay Peak Resort. PF’s meticulous observations from Mt. Mansfield and the elevation-dependent snowfall discussion we’ve had at Liftlines and here are the perfect primers for people to make the connection. A 40% increase in snowfall at PF’s ~3,000’ plot over his ~1,500’ plot is certainly within reason based on the numbers he’s discussed. If you scale that 1,500’ ratio proportionally for the ~2,000’ elevation differential between the Jay Peak co-op and the Jay Peak summit, what do you get? …~350”. If you ask me, that’s suspiciously consistent with the ~355” season snowfall average that they often report for their summit elevation. PF literally states in the quote above that the 3,500’ – 4,000’ elevations are where you start to get into that “next level stuff”. But you know, since it doesn’t happen in everybody’s back yard, I’m sure nobody in the Eastern U.S., especially a greedy, profit-driven, slant-sticking, snowfall-inflating ski resort, can average that much snow in a season. The numbers must be cooked independently at both the co-op and the resort summit so that they line up perfectly. That’s how the conspiracy is run up there.