NNE Cold Season Thread 2023/2024

[Froude]

Just a couple shingles gone here. A friend in Pleasant Valley said their neighborhood has a bunch of trees down, broken garage doors, shed door blown off the hinges.  Glad the east side and mountains come out of it with a gain.

[mreaves]

36 minutes ago, #NoPoles said:

Temp is dropping. Freeze up is not far away. I wonder if we get another burst of snow when the ULL rotates through?

Temp dropped here too but rebounded up to 41°.  Probably tonight before things freeze.

[NoCORH4L]

Do you guys have a feel one way or another if ice will be safe for fishing this weekend in central NH? Thinking somewhere like Lake Tarleton or Upper Baker Pond, somewhere with a little elevation is the plan. 

I was up on the new year and there was basically no ice at all. 

[Boston Bulldog]

Initial offerings from BTV for this weekend are a bit more paltry than the last storm. There does appear to be a significantly better upslope setup than what we are experiencing right now, so accumulation should continue in favored zones beyond this point on Sunday.

[DavisStraight]

21 minutes ago, Boston Bulldog said:

Initial offerings from BTV for this weekend are a bit more paltry than the last storm. There does appear to be a significantly better upslope setup than what what we are experiencing right now, so accumulation should continue in favored zones beyond this point on Sunday.

Upslope is their bread and butter.

[J.Spin]

Below I’ve put together the north to south list of what I’ve seen reported for Winter Storm Finn snow totals from the Vermont ski areas. It looks like totals were in the 6” range for the southern ski areas and ±12” along the spine in the central to northern ski areas.

Jay Peak: 13”

Burke: 6”

Smuggler’s Notch: 8”

Stowe: 10”

Bolton Valley: 10”

Mad River Glen: 12”

Sugarbush: 9”

Middlebury: 6”

Saskadena Six: 5”

Ski Quechee: 8”

Pico: 10”

Killington: 10”

Okemo: 10”

Bromley: 6”

Magic Mountain: 6”

Stratton: 6”

Mount Snow: 6”

[bwt3650]

Initial offerings from BTV for this weekend are a bit more paltry than the last storm. There does appear to be a significantly better upslope setup than what we are experiencing right now, so accumulation should continue in favored zones beyond this point on Sunday.

Looks like a great upslope pattern setting up over the next ten days beyond this storm. I bet we clean up on some under the radar events.


.

[das]

8 hours ago, J.Spin said:

Below I’ve put together the north to south list of what I’ve seen reported for Winter Storm Finn snow totals from the Vermont ski areas. It looks like totals were in the 6” range for the southern ski areas and ±12” along the spine in the central to northern ski areas.

Jay Peak: 13”

Burke: 6”

Smuggler’s Notch: 8”

Stowe: 10”

Bolton Valley: 10”

Mad River Glen: 12”

Sugarbush: 9”

Middlebury: 6”

Saskadena Six: 5”

Ski Quechee: 8”

Pico: 10”

Killington: 10”

Okemo: 10”

Bromley: 6”

Magic Mountain: 6”

Stratton: 6”

Mount Snow: 6”

And, the total for the anti-ski area of Charlotte down here at 284’ in the Valley was 3.4”.  A decent front end thump. 

[J.Spin]

On 1/9/2024 at 6:02 PM, dmcginvt said:

What a wild place you live in.  I have been paying attention to your measurements for years but especially since I lived in the Village from 2015-2018, and since I've live on Gregg Hill at 820ft since 2019.   In the village I never beat you, you always had more.  But since 2019 at GH in a few elevation events I beat you handily, but I do see looking at point forecasts that they are calling for 3-7 for me and 4-8 for you.  Of course my old village location shows 4-8 too.  Snowing nicely out there right now that's for sure and we are nowhere near the meat for a few hours.,  The microclimates of Vermont intrigue me.  The Garfield Section of Hyde Park/Moville/Wolcott the most.  It's a magical place

Yeah, the microclimates around here are simply amazing – sticking a 4,000’ wall of mountains at this latitude, along with all the extra nooks and crannies of the local sub-ranges, with substantial moisture sources to the east and the west and all the different types of weather systems we get… it’s an incubator for interesting weather.

This morning was a classic example of the localized and frequent weather around here. It was snowing and accumulating at observations time this morning, and it took me a while to figure out its origin. It was too far removed from the back side of Winter Storm Finn to put it there, and too far ahead of the shortwave that’s supposed to come into the area this afternoon to be assigned to that system. The BTV NWS forecast discussion mentioned the snow around, but didn’t assign it to any specific weather feature. Eventually, after some analysis of the models and radar, I simply had to attribute it to moist westerly flow off Lake Ontario. Mother Nature seems to love to squeeze in extra weather events around here.

And indeed as you noted, this area around here is a local hotspot for snow – that was one of the first things that a neighbor told me when I moved here. Folks like PF and mreaves have pointed out how there are just a lot of reasons: we’re at roughly the pass/high point here through the Winooski gap, so we get the convergence that comes with the gap, plus a bit of extra boost with the elevation rising out of Bolton Flats. There’s not a lot of downsloping here, and being just about in line with the spine, the area can get in on both east side and west side events. We’re also just enough on the east side of the spine so that there’s a decent amount of protection from the warm air intrusions from the west. The only attribute that’s not really present in this area is additional elevation as you noted. At times, this part of the valley sort of punches above its weight in terms of elevation because of the apparent cooling that can come from the forced ascent off the terrain in dynamic situations, but that’s not always going to cut it, and sometimes the snowfall will be lower/wetter just as you’d expect for being in the lower reaches of the Winooski Valley.

[MRVexpat]

Looks to be coming down hard on the Sugarbush webcams but radar imagine is inconspicuous. Is there a correlation between the type of radar tilt utilized and what can be displayed from a particular pulse of moisture?

[das]

Steady, constant light snow since 2pm this afternoon for a whopping 0.3”. No melting, either. That’s just how light the snow has been the whole time.

 

 

[eyewall]

Looks like up to 70 mph gusts coming for the western slopes of the Greens!

[mreaves]

BTV has upped our expected totals a little. 

[powderfreak]

Today was a good day on the hill.

High Road plot picked up ~1” yesterday afternoon and 3” overnight.  4” total added in 18 hours.  We like to clear the board sometime in the AM and sometime in the PM if it’s snowing.  Round to the nearest inch, up or down.

Today the new snow seemed to dry out the crust a bit.  Ski Patrol dropped a variety of ropes.

4pm. Cleared.

9am.

 

[dmcginvt]

Just no snow, it's refusing to snow.  Must be evaporating over our heads

[dmcginvt]

Took awhile but it started about an hour ago came down hard for a bit but still moderate now, and definitely breezy,

0.5 in so far

[dmcginvt]

 

 

Now s+, it’s dumping 

[Froude]

Dumping catpaws, ushering in the cold air. Hopefully we can keep it below freezing for awhile finally.

[EMontpelierWhiteout]

Nice burst of +SN after a soggy day. Covering up all the slush in my driveway. Hardest snow I’ve seen from the entire event. Upcoming week seems like real time winter conditions and maybe genuine chance of building a decent snowpack. 

[J.Spin]

Below is the north to south listing of available snow totals from Winter Storm Gerri thus far for the Vermont ski areas that have made end-of-day snow report updates. I didn’t see any late day updates for the southern half of the state, but up to this point the storm has delivered about a half foot or so of snow, with totals appearing to taper down a bit for the most northern areas.

Jay Peak: 4”

Smuggler’s Notch: 3”

Stowe: 7”

Bolton Valley: 7”

Sugarbush: 6”

Pico: 7”

Killington: 7”

[alex]

It's turning into a birch bender here. Huge flakes of wet snow at 32 degrees - everything is plastered 

[J.Spin]

Over the past week, the weather pattern has featured these larger systems with ample snow and moisture, and the most recent one in the series is Winter Storm Gerri. It moved into the area overnight in the wee hours with an initial burst of heavy snow. The front end snow in this case wasn’t as potent as it was with Winter Storm Finn that came through midweek, so when we saw that Bolton Valley was indicating only 2 inches of new snow in their early morning report, we knew there was no need to rush right up to the mountain.

We watched the Bolton Valley Base Area Webcam through the morning and could see that up at 2,100’, the precipitation was snow, and it was quite heavy at times. My younger son and a friend headed up in the early afternoon, and we asked them to give us an update on what they found. Their impressions were that the snow surfaces were rather wet, and they said the precipitation was even mixed with rain in the lower elevations at times, so my wife figured that instead of skiing, she’d hold off until the snow got better. I took another look at the webcam feed and saw that there was heavy snow falling, and decided that it would definitely be worth it to head up for some lift-served runs.

Heading up the Bolton Valley Access Road, the precipitation switched over to all snow at roughly the 1,000’ elevation, and above that the road was quickly covered. The road conditions must have been getting a bit slick with the new snowfall because I had to drive around a van that was stuck trying to make it up the steep s-curve below Timberline. I had actually planned to park at Timberline and start my session there, but the Timberline Quad was apparently on wind hold, so I had to continue on up to the main base area. I arrived up in the Village to very heavy snowfall in the 1 to 2 inch per hour range, and with the intensity of that snowfall, there was just no way that the turns weren’t going to be great.

During my afternoon session I managed to get in runs on all the rest of the lifts, and heavy snow continued to pound the resort at all elevations. It was windy, especially at the Vista and Wilderness Summits above 3,000’, but thankfully the wind was from the west and at your back while you rode the lifts. After my first couple of runs, the lights were coming on, and I got to ski Spillway in night mode. I always find it exciting to be able to ski something that steep at night, and I knew that the conditions on Spillway were going to be really good because you couldn’t hear anything from the skiers and snowboarders below you as you passed over them on the Vista Quad. Indeed, my own experience on the trail revealed that the conditions on Spillway were simply fantastic. New snow was falling so fast that it must have been covering up an slick spots faster than skiers could push the snow away.

I did notice that below the Mid Mountain elevations (~2,500’), the groomed/packed ski surfaces did have that “wet pack” feel that I’ve encountered in the lower elevations of Whistler Blackcomb. That’s usually a sign that some very wet snow has fallen and was packed by skier traffic. I could see what my son was talking about with respect to the wet surface conditions, but at the point that I was up there, those conditions were hard to find because temperatures were falling, and it was snowing so hard that those types of wet surfaces were covered up in all but the highest traffic areas. Some of the best turns I found were near the end of my ski session when I visited the Snowflake Chair. That area hadn’t seen much skier traffic, so I found a lot of fresh powder that skied beautifully. I did numerous depth checks and was consistently getting new snow depths of 6 to 7 inches. There was enough powder there that I questioned whether it was all from just this storm, but when Bolton’s afternoon snow update came in and they were reporting storm totals of 5 to 7 inches, that nicely corroborated my measurements.

All this new snow is a great addition to the snowpack, but even without it, one thing I noticed while out on the mountain today was the huge jump that the snowpack has taken since last weekend. I hadn’t been up to the mountain since Sunday, and at that time, patrol was just starting to open up more areas of natural snow terrain as coverage improved thanks to Winter Storm Ember. The contributions made by Winter Storm Finn must have been huge though, because the resort has now been able to open up just about everything, and everywhere I looked this evening, coverage felt like midwinter. As I look back now at my storm data, I guess I see the difference – Winter Storm Ember dropped 0.69 inches of liquid equivalent here at our site, while Winter Storm Finn dropped 1.99 inches of liquid equivalent. That’s almost triple the amount of liquid, and when you get up around 2 inches of liquid equivalent, that starts to become a serious resurfacing of the slopes. Winter Storm Gerri has already dropped about an inch of liquid equivalent here at the house, and the back side snow is still coming through, so that’s simply adding yet another great layer to the snowpack. All told, this past week of storms has dropped almost 4 inches of liquid equivalent here at our house in the valley, so it must have put down at least 4 to 5 inches of liquid equivalent for the mountains. When I look at the numbers, I realize now why the snowpack seems to have improved so much so quickly. When I was riding the Wilderness Chair today, I actually saw a ski patroller skiing the headwall of the Wilderness Lift Line to check the snow. You know the snowpack is getting decent when that headwall is even close to being skiable, so the fact that he was even testing it speaks volumes about how things have gone over the past week.

[borderwx]

Back to the regular Jan program apparently

Mountain absorbed the past week well, somehow skiing is the best of the season

Did not expect that. Looks like a good week of winter ahead




.

[J.Spin]

Below is the north to south listing for the final snow totals from Winter Storm Gerri for the Vermont ski areas that provided reports. There was certainly a lot of variability up and down the spine with this one, and no obvious north to south trends. The best hits seemed to be in the Bolton-Stowe stretch and around Killington with 9 to 10 inch totals.

Jay Peak: 6”

Burke: 2”

Smuggler’s Notch: 5”

Stowe: 9”

Bolton Valley: 9”

Mad River Glen: 3”

Sugarbush: 5”

Middlebury: 2”

Saskadena Six: 1”

Pico: 10”

Killington: 10”

Okemo: 6”

Magic Mountain: 4”

Stratton: 4”

Mount Snow: 7”

[EMontpelierWhiteout]

A good snow squall never disappoints. We had two distinct lines today with near white out conditions that added a quick two inches at the house.  Combined with the winds it completely relandscaped the yard. Weather is so cool. 

[powderfreak]

Added 2” more today through 2pm.

Pow is back with 11” of dense on top of the crust.

[mreaves]

2 hours ago, EMontpelierWhiteout said:

A good snow squall never disappoints. We had two distinct lines today with near white out conditions that added a quick two inches at the house.  Combined with the winds it completely relandscaped the yard. Weather is so cool. 

This was the second squall around here. We got 2” as well. 

[J.Spin]

With the additional overnight snowfall, Bolton was reporting a total of 9 inches from Winter Storm Gerri as of their early morning report. And, since the Timberline Quad didn’t open yesterday due to winds, today would also be its inaugural run of the season, so the chance to visit the Timberline terrain that nobody has really skied at all up to this point was a nice bonus.

Based on the conditions I encountered yesterday, I really expected the main mountain to offer the best conditions, especially above 2,500’ where the snow was never too wet, but there was always the chance that Timberline would surprise us due to all the fresh snow. After our first lift ride on the Timberline Quad, it actually had to go off line for a time due to a mechanical issue, so heading to the main mountain turned out to be the appropriate option anyway.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of fresh tracks to be had out there today, but I’d actually say the snow quality below 2,500’ was a notch below what it was when I was out yesterday afternoon/evening. Yesterday I was skiing in 6 to 7 inches of powder off Snowflake, but the bottom few inches of that snow must have still be fairly wet at that point because we found it had thickened up with today’s cooler temperatures. So, it meant that today we were only skiing in the top few inches of powder and contacting that denser snow below if you pressured hard enough. As long as you had untracked snow, it was nice skiing, but it certainly wasn’t as bottomless as yesterday in those lower elevations. Areas with previous skier traffic ended up with uneven subsurface that definitely detracted from the quality of the turns. Thankfully, the dense snow didn’t form anything like a breakable crust, which would have made the skiing much more challenging. On our return trip to the Timberline Base, we did get first tracks down the lower half of Tattle Tale, and that was really sweet, even if the powder wasn’t as bottomless as it would have been yesterday.

[mreaves]

Next up, Tuesday. 
 

[EMontpelierWhiteout]

2 hours ago, mreaves said:

Next up, Tuesday. 
 

Some good model trends today throwing more moisture further NW.  With high snow to liquid ratios, I think we’ll see some yellow shading along the spine in subsequent updates.