J.Spin

May snow is actually quite common – after poking around in my archives a bit, it looks like notable accumulations of May snow probably happen (on average) every year if one considers the entire Northeast. I just checked my archives, and it looks like substantial (6”+) May snow here in the Northern Greens is at least an every other year occurrence on average. Since 2010 I’ve got the following reports in my records: Jay Peak 09MAY2010 (6”+) Bolton Valley 10MAY2010 (8”+) Stowe 06MAY2011 (10”) Stowe 26MAY2013 (15”) Stowe 16MAY2016 (8”) If we were to get something substantial out of this potential upcoming event, that would be at least five significant May snowstorms in the past decade. For the Northeast in general, I’m sure the occurrence is more than every other year, especially with the Presidentials in the mix. I skied Mt. Washington on May 16th the season before last, and they’d just had almost three feet of snow. I don’t think the Greens had much with that event, as they were either out of the moisture/dynamics of the snow levels were just a bit too high. Since the list above obviously wouldn’t include any May snowstorms in the Northern Greens that I missed and didn’t make a report on, or any events that hit other parts of the Northeast where the Central/Northern Greens weren’t quite in on the substantial snows, it’s definitely averaging more than once every other year. Today’s event was a perfect example, with Mt. Snow getting some substantial snow. If that happened a bit closer to home there would have been a good chance I’d get out for a tour in the fresh snow, but heading that far south is a bit more of a commitment, especially on such short notice.

Indeed, that looks nice – there are plenty of skiable lines throughout the resort. Although they don’t get the snowfall numbers that the Northern Greens do, I think the temperature regime/snow retention is similar in the Sunday River/Sugarloaf region. Sugarloaf seems to have some of the best spring snow retention anywhere in NNE. I don’t think Wildcat does quite as well as Sugarloaf, and somehow I get the impression that Cannon is notably worse with snow retention vs. those others despite being at fairly high elevation up there in the mountains of New Hampshire.

From my office the other day I saw that there was quite a bit of white still visible on the slopes of Bolton Valley, so I headed up for a ski tour on Thursday and can pass along the beta on the snowpack. The first signs of snow along the Bolton Valley Access Road, are at 1,500’ near the base of the Timberline area, and there are even skiable lines farther up on Timberline. Up at the main mountain, continuous snowpack starts right at the base at around 2,100’. Multiple trails on the upper mountain have skiable snow, and the Bear Run/Sprig O’ Pine area on the lower mountain has quite solid coverage. Descending from up near 3,000’ on Spillway, I was able to ski almost continuous snow to the main base. There were a few small breaks in the snowpack, but nothing that required taking off my skis. The level of coverage they have right now wouldn’t be too surprising on the eastern slopes of the Greens this time of year, but that’s quite impressive for the western slopes. I’m not sure if it was the hearty snowpack we had this winter, the amount of snow the resort made, the lack of any hot spells this spring, or a combination of these factors, but Bolton definitely has a solid amount of snow on the ground for this far into May. A few shots from the tour:

We should probably give PF a hard time for starting the warm season thread a bit too soon. Cold/snow/ski season is essentially October through May – the beautiful image in his opening post clearly speaks to that. Those “other” four months of the year are the warm season around here – although you never know with June and September… and even August, especially later August can start the slide some years. I guess that leaves July. …and there’s an old saying somewhere along those lines.

The new format looks great Kevin – can’t wait to see what it looks like when it all comes together.

Oh, sorry, I'd written Goat there, but indeed meant Upper Liftline being closed due to the snow getting so close to the lift as you mentioned in one of your posts. It's quite the impressive snowpack all around!

LOL PF, I was going to take that exact picture when we were out at the mountain on Sunday. It’s crazy to think that Upper Goat there, which is more typically closed because of coverage of challenging snow, was closed because of too much snow. It was sort of a shame because it looked really nice.

Regardless of the snowpack, Stowe doesn’t typically deviate much from their planned closing date. I’ve heard mentioned that the current plan is for Easter Sunday? (April 21st), but PF can confirm the exact plans.

There is certainly a level of training and skill required to ski on ice, and indeed ski racers absolutely want that type of surface – they want a consistent, firm, fast surface with no surprises (loose snow means surprises). They’ve got the equipment, the edges, the training, (and hopefully insurance) to be out there. But for just about everyone else, what’s the point of being out on crappy, dangerous snow? There is this badge of honor thing put forth by many “Eastern” skiers about getting out there in all conditions and how “skiing on ice and crap snow makes you a better skier”. From firsthand experience after living out in the Rockies for a number of years, I can tell you that by and large that’s a massive crock. For the most part it’s just a defense mechanism or maxim used by skiers who are stuck skiing crap snow. Racers from essentially everywhere in the world train on ice, since the courses are either specifically iced up for use, or they get that way from repeated traffic in the same lines. I know a lot of us up here in the Northern Greens, much like many folks in the Rockies etc., are sort of “Powder Princesses” to some degree, because we get a lot of good snow days and can pick and choose to ski when the best snow is available. It’s a recreational sport though, so why am I going to force myself to go out and do it (and potentially even spend money) if it’s not fun? For the typical recreational skier, I’ve just never understood the point of “getting good at skiing on ice”. Why? So you can go out and ski more ice? To me, skiing on ice is the equivalent of going out to swim in cold water on a cloudy day with temperatures in the 60s F. Sure you can do it, but why? Honestly, if people aren’t simply fooling themselves, and honestly find skittering around on sloped ice more fun than skiing soft, quality snow, then more power to them I guess. From an instructional standpoint though, I find that my students learning to ski can push themselves much farther, they can improve faster, and they have much more confidence and fun on soft snow. I see this borne out all the time, but a perfect example was just a couple of weeks ago when I was able to bring my students down the relatively steep pitch of West Slope at Stowe. With the good snow available, it was right at the edge of their ability, but I know from previous experience working with them that they would have easily frozen up and panicked if the surface there was icy. I would never have brought them there under icy conditions, but instead, they got to ski something steeper than they’d ever skied and improve their ability to manage their turns on that type of terrain. A lot of the above is about preference, but a far more important aspect of avoiding overly icy snow surfaces is safety. With all the injuries (and even deaths) I’ve heard about in this thread this season due to hard snow conditions, I’m glad folks are recognizing that major issue.

There’s snow expected in the Northern Greens heading into tomorrow – PF made a quick update in the NNE thread, there are some additional posts there now as well, and PF has a detailed discussion of the upslope potential at Braatencast.

Nice stuff PF – indeed those are some of the easiest glades to get rolling in the early season; there’s generally nothing overly aggressive with respect to obstacles, and lower slope angle means even high speed lift-served skier traffic levels aren’t going to be tearing away the snow cover too quickly. From what I’ve seen, those glades are typically well in play by the time the stake has hit the 24” mark, unless the snow is total fluff or the snowfall has been extremely elevation dependent. I jumped into the trees for a bit at Bolton Valley yesterday on moderate-angle terrain at around 2,300’, and with probably 20 inches of reasonably dense snowpack topped with powder, there were certainly no issues. More things are in play/sustainable of course when it’s only non-lift-served skier traffic. I’m actually curious to see what the stake has got for snowpack, since it was last at 19” but hasn’t been updated for a couple of days. That is about a foot above average for this time of year though.

I don’t have data for other areas of the Northeast, but tree skiing in November is actually rather common in the Northern Greens. It starts in November in about ¼ (26.3%) of seasons. Once the snowpack at the Mt. Mansfield Stake hits roughly 24 inches, that’s about the time you’ll find people starting to ski the trees around here (mean start date is Dec 12th ± 19 days). I ran an analysis several years back in which I compared that 24” number to actual empirical online reports of people tree skiing, and it lined up fairly well. Using 24” is not overly aggressive (you’ll find people who will venture in before that), and it’s not as conservative at the 40” rule, it’s more of a decent measure of when semi-conservative folks will start venturing into appropriately maintained areas. Early season snowpack here can sometimes start as a lot of fluff (which means more than 24” may required for tree skiing) or dense snow (where less than 24” can suffice), so the 24” value is going to be an average of those possibilities. I’m not even sure if the stake has hit the 24” mark yet this season (the most recent report I’ve seen is 19”), so this is a great example of a season below that threshold because of the dense snowfall we’ve seen. Having the tree skiing around here start this early in November is a bit less common, it happens in about 10% of seasons. The updated plot (through 2017-2018) for the date of reaching 24” at the stake is posted below, which shows the number of times and dates in the past 60 years or so when tree skiing would have started in November.

Around here in the Northern/Central Greens, I’d say the more lenient resorts with respect to people skinning for turns would be Mad River Glen, Bolton Valley, Smugg’s, and Jay Peak. For the past several seasons, Sugarbush has seemed to be on the more restrictive side like most recent policies posted by Stowe, but even if you don’t visit those two resorts, that still leaves at least two eastern slope and two western slope options in the area. Ideally it’s best to have them all in play, since some areas can do better than others in any given storm cycle. I’m sure people are skinning for turns at Sugarbush and Stowe (PF noted the presence of cars), it’s probably just done a bit more covertly when the more restrictive policies are in place. Wherever you go though, just be respectful of the mountain, and especially the mountain operations that are going on. Ideally it’s just best to stay well away from any sort of work that’s being done (grooming, snowmaking, etc.), so if you can, choose a touring route that doesn’t go near any of that. And I’m glad you’re making use of the reports I send out. With mountain weather and snowpack conditions often changing so rapidly, and access to specific data from the higher elevations hard to come by, it can be really tough to know what’s going on up there. Getting that beta out there for others to use is definitely one of the key reasons for putting the reports together. When the snow is good, I’m typically going to be out there for recreation and exercise anyway. I’m always going to write up something and get photos to put in my ski journal/website anyway, and getting the weather and snow/weather conditions in there is an important part of documenting the event.

After the way things seemed to work last year, my advice on uphill at Stowe was to simply avoid it altogether once any mountain operations were taking place. With opening day set for November 16th, that essentially means any day now, or basically as soon as it’s cold enough to resume snowmaking. I decided to check on the formal uphill policy on the website: https://www.stowe.com/the-mountain/about-the-mountain/mountain-safety.aspx Here are a couple of relevant excerpts: Important Announcement - November 6, 2018 - TBD Please be advised that for the safety of our general public, guests and employees, uphill access will not be permitted during the early season due to mountain operations and snowmaking work taking place at the resort. Stowe Mountain Resort will open for uphill access when early season operations are complete, and when the resort has adequate terrain to safely permit these activities. So I figured once the mountain opened, that was it, no hiking for turns until they deemed “early season” was over (whenever that might be). But lower down on the page there’s also this: Mountain Closed for Uphill Access During Pre-Season Operations Although the mountain is closed for the season, mountain operations continue and skiing/riding is forbidden at this time. The way that’s written (closed for the season is usually written in the spring), it suggests they’re not even allowing any pre-season/off season hiking? I can only imagine how this policy is received by the Stowe town locals. It’s hard to know which of these policies are actually enforced, and which are actually just for legal C.Y.A. purposes by the resort. Perhaps things are back to the way it used to be long ago with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of policy, or guerrilla-style outings. I don’t think we actually had any really potent storms ahead of the lifts opening last fall, so if these next couple of systems deliver something substantial, I guess we’ll just have to see how it actually plays out at the mountain.

Thanks Kevin, as always, we appreciate this great resource you’ve put together. I just checked, and things seem to be working on my end. We’re into October now, which is typically our first month for accumulating snow (seems to be close to 70% of seasons based on my data), so hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll have something to put in the table.

Nice PF, we always love it when you revisit these awesome stretches of snowfall with your Mansfield snowfall numbers and images. I checked my data for that 22-day stretch and it looks like we picked up just about 55” at our place, so right around 50% of the upper mountain snowfall as usual. I think timing of the biggest days during that period had me skiing solo, so I couldn’t get the boys in any of those deliciously deep shots that we love, but I still grabbed a few fun images from that stretch in the Northern Greens: