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NNE Cold Season Thread 2024-2025


bwt3650
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2 hours ago, Lava Rock said:

Crazy how well VT ski areas are doing relative to Maine. Then to consider the current pack in PWM is deeper than Caribou makes it more head scratching.

VT's going to do well when the prevailing method of snowfall is mesoscale, orographic, lake effect, upslope, clippers, westerly flow.  ME is going to do better if we are in a coastal pattern with more S/SE/E/NE flow events.

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1 hour ago, sankaty said:

The discrepancy between the Euro and the GFS for the next two storms will have major implications for ski conditions over the holiday week. Any reason to favor one model over the other in this case?

Thats a good point.  That has massive holiday weekend/vacation week implications.

And because Nature has shown time and time again that it hates vacation periods, it’ll probably be wet and crusty instead of deep and soft.

It’ll be fascinatingly annoying for the casual skiers to see parts of NNE get buried (or at least not rain or thaw freeze cycle) for like 6 weeks… only to see the last time it rained was coming out of the Xmas-New Years vacation period and then the streak ends at Presidents Weekend/week vacation period.

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Sounds about right.

The GFS has been right the past couple of cycles when it's been colder than the Euro. Here's hoping that streak can overpower the holiday curse.

It has seemed that the Euro dominance over the GFS is not as strong as it has been in years past, but it's hard to shake the sense of dread when the Euro is on the wrong side.

I just wired my ski boot insoles for heat, so I'm ready for arctic cold and snow.

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29 minutes ago, sankaty said:

Sounds about right.

The GFS has been right the past couple of cycles when it's been colder than the Euro. Here's hoping that streak can overpower the holiday curse.

It has seemed that the Euro dominance over the GFS is not as strong as it has been in years past, but it's hard to shake the sense of dread when the Euro is on the wrong side.

I just wired my ski boot insoles for heat, so I'm ready for arctic cold and snow.

I treat the GFS and ECMWF as equals today. It could go either way for sure. You just hope the positive busts continue.

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Yesterday I headed up to Bolton Valley with my younger son and some of his friends to ski the accumulations from Winter Storm Garnett. The resort was reporting 8 inches of new snow from the system as of their morning update, so on top of the accumulations that we’ve been getting from the parade of small and moderate storms over the last several weeks, it was just another layer of frosting on the cake. Down in the valley we’d picked up 0.40 inches of liquid equivalent from the storm at that point, so the upper elevations of the resort should have picked up at least a half inch of liquid. That’s a moderate resurfacing of the slopes, but the quality of the subsurface snow is so high at this point, that even a half inch of liquid equivalent sets up some fantastic skiing.

The depth of the snowpack at the Mt. Mansfield Stake is now 84 inches, or put another way, the snow is 7 feet deep, so more and more steep slopes and ledges are coming into play every day. Another important aspect of Winter Storm Garnett was that it came without much wind at all, so that has finally allowed some of the wind-scoured western facing pitches at Bolton to start building some snowpack.

In practical ski terms, the state of the snowpack plus the new snow let us focus on a “steep and deep” day, hitting areas like Devil’s Playground, some of the chutes off Upper Crossover, and various other places. The heavily scoured steep areas definitely need a few more moderate storms, or perhaps a big system with easterly instead of westerly flow to acquire a deep base, but a lot of steep, fun terrain is already in play.

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9 hours ago, powderfreak said:

Snowy times we live in.

IMG_2701.thumb.jpeg.511037bbadb85bcba92c98820b7f0285.jpeg

Hey, every part of the globe deals with climate change differently. As they say, it’s just something you’re going to have to get used to going forward. So… “Deal with it.”, I guess?

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10 hours ago, sankaty said:

Sounds about right.

The GFS has been right the past couple of cycles when it's been colder than the Euro. Here's hoping that streak can overpower the holiday curse.

It has seemed that the Euro dominance over the GFS is not as strong as it has been in years past, but it's hard to shake the sense of dread when the Euro is on the wrong side.

I just wired my ski boot insoles for heat, so I'm ready for arctic cold and snow.

I've been using the stick-on foot warmers and they work really well and last all day. I used to have heated boots back in the late 80's (Lange TSH). Never thought they worked that great, but technology is much better now.

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10 hours ago, sankaty said:

Sounds about right.

The GFS has been right the past couple of cycles when it's been colder than the Euro. Here's hoping that streak can overpower the holiday curse.

It has seemed that the Euro dominance over the GFS is not as strong as it has been in years past, but it's hard to shake the sense of dread when the Euro is on the wrong side.

I just wired my ski boot insoles for heat, so I'm ready for arctic cold and snow.

ohhhh how did you do this? I was skiing last night and my toes got pretty cold. they thawed out nicely with a couple beers in the pub, but I don't like cold toes

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6 hours ago, SJonesWX said:

ohhhh how did you do this? I was skiing last night and my toes got pretty cold. they thawed out nicely with a couple beers in the pub, but I don't like cold toes

I'll post later today about my adventures in boot heating in the ski season thread later today. Don't want to go too far off topic here.

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2 hours ago, sankaty said:

I'll post later today about my adventures in boot heating in the ski season thread later today. Don't want to go too far off topic here.

Word of caution with that but would love to hear the “adventures” ha.  There’s been some incidents where that goes wrong, it goes very wrong (like your feet getting burned while you are on a chairlift with no way to stop it until you get off up top).

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1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

Word of caution with that but would love to hear the “adventures” ha.  There’s been some incidents where that goes wrong, it goes very wrong (like your feet getting burned while you are on a chairlift with no way to stop it until you get off up top).

Yikes! Even on the lift, I could pull the cord out of the battery, so hopefully I won't have that kind of "adventure." There are thousands of these in circulation, and with our litigious society, I don't think Therm-ic would survive if this happened with any significant frequency. Please don't quote this back to me if I end up in a ski boot heater accident headline.

Posted my installation process in the ski season thread.

Euro and GFS still locked in a model death match for the weekend. Hoping the Americans win this time around (have a decent feeling about it).

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19 minutes ago, sankaty said:

Yikes! Even on the lift, I could pull the cord out of the battery, so hopefully I won't have that kind of "adventure." There are thousands of these in circulation, and with our litigious society, I don't think Therm-ic would survive if this happened with any significant frequency. Please don't quote this back to me if I end up in a ski boot heater accident headline.

Posted my installation process in the ski season thread.

Euro and GFS still locked in a model death match for the weekend. Hoping the Americans win this time around (have a decent feeling about it).

Yeah for sure, if incidents were common they'd never be used.  Hotronic is the brand Stowe always sold.  I also didn't mean to imply the products themselves were the problem... as with most things in life, user error is often the culprit.  If there's a potential for injury with a product (any product at all), there's always someone who can manage it, ha.

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3 minutes ago, alex said:

Snowing pretty well tonight

Good west to east boundary across the region right now.  Precip keeps reforming west of the bigger terrain barriers along the axis, love to see it.

A quick 4” at the Lookout snow cam… there’s maybe an inch of feathers here in town to the east though.  Its more from mountain westward to BTV.

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&&

.NEAR TERM /THROUGH WEDNESDAY/...
As of 620 PM EST Tuesday...Main focus of this update was to try
and depict the stationary front and associated heavy snow that
has stalled from southern St. Lawrence County, across
Burlington, and out to the Northeast Kingdom. Models do not have
a good handle on this feature, as it was expected to slide
south through the region easily. It is now stuck here over the
forecast area, and it`s hard to say how long it will continue to
dump snow on that spot. Best forecast is that it may last
through about 10 PM, give or take an hour. Will continue to
monitor.
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I'm heading up for my second VT trip with the family this weekend.

Had an absolute blast at Mount Snow over MLK, deep winter up there - driving through Albany with just a few inches on the ground to 18-24" as you climbed up into the Greens was awesome.

I'd love to head further up to Stowe, Jay, et all but it's too far with kids so we're staying in Wilmington and hitting Snow again and maybe Okemo if we get ambitious.

Kids are fairly new to skiing but i splurged for the Epic Pass and we've done about 10 days on the season...they have no trouble with blues so Snowdance, Ridge Run, Sunbrook are perfect for them.

Worried about the Pres Day crowds and potential ice but encouraged by the latest modeling shifts (sans the Euro)... GFS is 36 hours of almost all snow capped by a great CCB Sunday evening... Let's hope!

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Feeling less optimistic about the weekend storm. Each successive run has been building heights over the east as the storm approaches. The cold air over New England hangs in surprisingly well compared to changes upstream. Assume the last-minute coastal development is saving us from a total washout.

Obviously things could change, but seems likely that sleet at least will mix in around the Killington area. Conventional wisdom is that sleet doesn't damage ski surface conditions too much?

Also somewhat optimistic that even some freezing rain would just cause a crust on top of the new snow, which might not be too much of an issue after the new snow gets skied in (one of the times when you don't want first tracks through the woods :)).

 

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