NNE Cold Season Thread 2021/2022

[#NoPoles]

8 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Interesting…GFS/GGEM/EURO.

 

Cheese and crackers, what the heck is this crap??? No thank you, please go away

[PhineasC]

6 minutes ago, #NoPoles said:

Cheese and crackers, what the heck is this crap??? No thank you, please go away

I doubt anyone up there wants this. LOL

[timp]

51 minutes ago, PhineasC said:

I doubt anyone up there wants this. LOL

I do! Three years up here and have yet to see a significant late season storm. Let it snow and melt the next day sounds great. 

[PhineasC]

5 minutes ago, timp said:

I do! Three years up here and have yet to see a significant late season storm. Let it snow and melt the next day sounds great. 

Well, you might get it, although these spring coastals seem to favor NH/Maine usually.

I will never root against snow. It's just not in my nature.

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, PhineasC said:

Well, you might get it, although these spring coastals seem to favor NH/Maine usually.

I will never root against snow. It's just not in my nature.

Yeah I mean never root against it.  @ORH_wxman always brings the logic, if the choices are cold rain vs snow that’s an easy choice.  Like when folks say they don’t want it to snow… 42F heavy rain doesn’t sound any better lol.

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, PhineasC said:

Well, you might get it, although these spring coastals seem to favor NH/Maine usually.

The Euro track would be par for the course this year… inland cutter up the CT River Valley into NNH.

The Adirondacks have a good shot in this one seeing the low elevations are like 1500ft with many inhabited areas 1800-2200ft.

[bwt3650]

11 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Interesting…GFS/GGEM/EURO.

 

Going to suck me back in for an early week drive up. 

[powderfreak]

Snowing down through the base area at 1500ft this morning .

 

[Ginx snewx]

1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

Snowing down through the base area at 1500ft this morning .

 

Some are surprised others not.

[wxeyeNH]

I like the new Mount Washington cams.  They have put the Wildcat and observatory cams on streaming Youtube.  Snowing at the summit as of 430pm

https://www.mountwashington.org/weathercams/deckcam.aspx

[backedgeapproaching]

Epitome of a late season snow map..

[#NoPoles]

Oh boy, I have to drive from Bretton Woods to North Conway- 5wk post op appointment with my ACL Surgeon. Not looking forward to driving in the weather that is coming

[timp]

Little more than I expected waking up to. 3.5” on the deck. 

[mreaves]

3" here and 32°. Still snowing a little.  Really fine grains that I thought were rain/mist until I went out to measure.

[alex]

A nasty inch of slop here, now a mix of rain/sleet. Crazy wind, power outages. 

[PhineasC]

About 2 inches of slop it appears. 

[J.Spin]

Event totals: 0.9” Snow/1.09” L.E.

 

This morning’s snow at our site was impressively dense – there was more than half an inch of liquid in just an inch of snow.  Lifting the snowboards to clear them this morning was a monumental effort.  We’d already had more than an inch of liquid equivalent from this storm as of this morning’s early report, and I haven’t been up to the slopes yet, but it must have been an almost instant resurfacing with the amount of liquid equivalent that has come through the area thus far.  Power is out in a lot of places due to the dense snow, and Bolton’s main base webcam is down for presumably that reason.  It looks like there’s about a half foot of new snow on the Stowe snow stake webcam though.

 

Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations:

New Snow: 0.9 inches

New Liquid: 0.58 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 1.6

Snow Density: 64.4% H2O

Temperature: 32.7 F

Sky: Snow (2 – 10 mm flakes)

Snow at the stake: 1.0 inches

[tamarack]

0.2" of 2:1 "stuff" fell 7:15-8:45 then cold rain.  Had to call tech support who talked me thru rebooting the WiFi connection.  She said they were having all kinds of issues, probably storm related.  An hour-plus ago CMP was reporting over 20k w/o power.  Little wind here, just RA- and mid 30s.

[Patriot21]

2-3 inches of gloop this morning

[powderfreak]

This is an incredible radar.  This is dumping on the mountains.

After melting this afternoon in the warm sector it has come back strong.  There was ~6-6.5" at the board flip and the location is usually less than the calmer, ground based High Road location.

 

[bwt3650]

28 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

This is an incredible radar.  This is dumping on the mountains.

After melting this afternoon in the warm sector it has come back strong.  There was ~6-6.5" at the board flip and the location is usually less than the calmer, ground based High Road location.

 

The railing was cleared after the changeover so this is the upslope so far..2-3 maybe.  And the heaviest looked like midnight to 6am…bitter sweet last night of spot light watching fake snow for the season for me.

[powderfreak]

7 minutes ago, bwt3650 said:

The railing was cleared after the changeover so this is the upslope so far..2-3 maybe.  And the heaviest looked like midnight to 6am…bitter sweet last night of spot light watching fake snow for the season for me.

It’s all fake.  The ability to create precip and snow on westerly winds (the prevailing default flow in N.America) into the Northern Greens is what makes this the powder skiing capital of the East.

[J.Spin]

Event totals: 1.1” Snow/1.38” L.E.

 

We had a few flakes flying at the house this morning that will call for another trace in tomorrow morning’s CoCoRaHS report, but the totals above should be it for this event at our site.  I’m seeing plenty of storm totals around here in the 1.5” range for liquid equivalent, so you know the mountains picked up at least that much.  That’s certainly a solid resurfacing for the slopes, and I’ll pass along some mountain observations as soon as I get a chance to write those up.

 

Details from the 6:00 A.M. Waterbury observations:

New Snow: 0.2 inches

New Liquid: 0.12 inches

Snow/Water Ratio: 1.7

Snow Density: 60.0% H2O

Temperature: 36.0 F

Sky: Cloudy

Snow at the stake: Trace

[Froude]

Took the scenic route home today. Mansfield looking as good as she has all winter.

[PhineasC]

19 minutes ago, Froude said:

Took the scenic route home today. Mansfield looking as good as she has all winter.

That grass looks green and lush though.

[powderfreak]

20 minutes ago, PhineasC said:

That grass looks green and lush though.

The grass looked insanely green today everywhere after the snow yesterday.  Even where snow was still on the ground some parts melted out were like glowing green.

Spring snow must’ve been like fertilizer.

Wild to have the deepest snow of season in the upper elevations while it’s so green in the valleys.  I love this time of year.

First above average snow depth reading since the first week of December .

Storm Totals:

3,800ft… 15” (depth from 47” to 62”)

3,100ft… 13”

1,500ft… 8”

From Ruschpy (Instagram) on Mansfield today…

[PhineasC]

16 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

The grass looked insanely green today everywhere after the snow yesterday.  Even where snow was still on the ground some parts melted out were like glowing green.

Spring snow must’ve been like fertilizer.

Wild to have the deepest snow of season in the upper elevations while it’s so green in the valleys.  I love this time of year.

First above average snow depth reading since the first week of December .

Storm Totals:

3,800ft… 15” (depth from 47” to 62”)

3,100ft… 13”

1,500ft… 8”

From Ruschpy (Instagram) on Mansfield today…

Really unique late season period over there for sure. I just hope NH dries out before I come back up in May.

[powderfreak]

BTV’s observed snowfall map…

[J.Spin]

I wasn’t able to get out for a ski tour on Tuesday morning, but I did have enough time to head out to Bolton later in the afternoon and check out what this most recent storm had to offer.  As we know, a great feature of the March through June portion of the ski season is the long lasting daylight, and that makes late afternoon and even evening ski sessions very practical.

It kept snowing right through the day on Tuesday, but it did warm up enough to melt back the earlier snow a bit, especially the lower one went in elevation.  There was still a solid coating of snow in place even in the late afternoon at the base of the Bolton Valley Access Road, and here’s the storm accumulations profile I found at that point:

340’: T-1”

1,000’: 1-2”

1,500’:  3-4”

2,000’:  7-8”

2,500’:  8-10”

3,000’: 10-12”

This storm was unquestionably another solid resurfacing of the snowpack at elevation.  The mountains must have had at least an inch and a half of liquid equivalent as snow, and combined with the density of that snow, it was enough to resurface slopes of just about any angle, right up to the steepest of the steep.  The density of the snow meant that it covered, and stayed stuck to, just about every slope out there.  It’s easy for snow to be too dense to enable quality turns though, and this storm didn’t just flirt with that line, it flew way past it.  Even the folks out in the west coast ranges that routinely deal with Sierra Cement and Cascade Concrete would have cried after dealing with this stuff.

There are times when you’re ski touring, and you can’t quite tell what the quality of the turns is going to be like until you really rip off the skins and start your descent; this was not one of those times.  Right from the start of my tour, I could tell that the skiing was going to be disastrous.  On the lower half of the mountain from say 2,000’ on up to ~2,500’, the snow was super dense, with a bit of melting going on to up the density just a bit more for good measure.  I held out a little hope that the quality of the snow in the higher elevations would improve, as it often does with lower temperatures producing drier snow that skis better.  Ha, not this time.  As I continued to ascend, the snow conditions only got worse.  The snow went from something that was super dense and a bit wet, that you really didn’t sink into much… to an even worse version of that.  As temperatures dipped below freezing on the upper mountain, the top couple of inches of snow has become a solid mass to produce the most horrible, upside-down snowpack you could imagine.  The skiing was challenging, dangerous, disgusting, and everything in between.

So the snowfall from this storm was indeed a great resurfacing, and a solid addition to the mountain snowpack, but it would have taken another good half foot or so of drier snow to really get the immediate quality of the ski surfaces up to snuff.  It was snowing while I was out there on Tuesday, with some nice steady snow at times, but there was probably only another inch or two of additional snow above the dense stuff, so not enough to really bring up the snow quality to something more respectable.

Every spring snowstorm is different though, and that’s part of the fun of experiencing them, and we’ll just have to see what the next one does.

A few shots from Tuesday:

[J.Spin]

19 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Wild to have the deepest snow of season in the upper elevations while it’s so green in the valleys.  I love this time of year.

First above average snow depth reading since the first week of December .

Storm Totals:

3,800ft… 15” (depth from 47” to 62”)

3,100ft… 13”

1,500ft… 8”

From Ruschpy (Instagram) on Mansfield today…

Nice – I saw that Mother Nature had caught back up to average at the stake, and I was going to post the plot if you hadn’t.  That definitely bodes well for the rest of the season relative to where the snowpack was a few weeks ago.  And there’s no concern about the snow from this most recent storm falling short on its contribution to the snowpack – with the density I encountered out there, it’s probably close to the density of settled season snowpack already.  This storm was a really solid addition of liquid to the pack, even if it didn’t produce quite the right-side-up quality of deposition that some storms do.