NNE Cold Season Thread 2024-2025

[tamarack]

On 12/5/2024 at 6:37 PM, powderfreak said:

Been a minute since I’ve experienced Thundersnow… that was awesome.  That band is a beast down near Bolton now.

Happened thrice for me:  12/24/66 in NNJ (didn't believe it possible until the 2nd boom).  11/21/89 in Gardiner and 2/10/05 here in New Sharon.  Spacing would say that #4 was coming soon.  (Of course, like TCs, spacing means nothing.)

[DavisStraight]

4 hours ago, tamarack said:

Happened thrice for me:  12/24/66 in NNJ (didn't believe it possible until the 2nd boom).  11/21/89 in Gardiner and 2/10/05 here in New Sharon.  Spacing would say that #4 was coming soon.  (Of course, like TCs, spacing means nothing.)

First time I experienced it was surreal, snowing 3-4 inches an hour and the sky lit up blue then the lights went out.

[kdxken]

13 years ago in my old hood.

[J.Spin]

Alerts came out early this morning for our next Winter Weather Advisory – the current BTV NWS maps are below:

[tamarack]

November numbers:

Avg max:     46.4   +4.0   Mildest, 69 on the 1st and 6th
Avg min:      29.1    +4.5   Coldest, 14 on the 15th
Mean:          37.8   +4.2   2nd mildest November, only 0.1° lower than 2006.

Precip:     3.78"    +0.44"    Wettest (whitest):  1.09" on the 28th

Snow:    9.0"      +4.0"    The 8" storm on 28-29 was a branch breaker (several large pine limbs) as it had 1.44" LE for a ratio of 5.5-to-1.  The 6" recorded on the 18th is the greatest on                                               Thanksgiving here.

[mreaves]

37 minutes ago, tamarack said:

November numbers:

Avg max:     46.4   +4.0   Mildest, 69 on the 1st and 6th
Avg min:      29.1    +4.5   Coldest, 14 on the 15th
Mean:          37.8   +4.2   2nd mildest November, only 0.1° lower than 2006.

Precip:     3.78"    +0.44"    Wettest (whitest):  1.09" on the 28th

Snow:    9.0"      +4.0"    The 8" storm on 28-29 was a branch breaker (several large pine limbs) as it had 1.44" LE for a ratio of 5.5-to-1.  The 6" recorded on the 18th is the greatest on                                               Thanksgiving here.

I travelled to Presque Isle for Thanksgiving, quite a bit on Rt.2.  I thought of you as I was going through New Sharon.

[borderwx]

Felt like a proper December day out there today. No need for the B/W filter. We had a couple inches to refresh the surfaces and make for a fun deer tracking morning and a few fun hours on the Mt.




.

[powderfreak]

I had never heard of Jiobit, but technology has some wins at times.  GPS devices (phones, watches, cat/dog trackers) do help rescue people who become lost, disoriented, hurt, etc.

This would’ve been a much bigger deal in the past.

[dendrite]

Deep winter. Pack is into the double digits. 

[mreaves]

33 minutes ago, dendrite said:

Deep winter. Pack is into the double digits. 

Similar here.  As I said last night, I left my driveway untouched in case of freezing rain figuring tomorrow will reset it to bare gravel anyway.

[dendrite]

16 minutes ago, mreaves said:

Similar here.  As I said last night, I left my driveway untouched in case of freezing rain figuring tomorrow will reset it to bare gravel anyway.

I’m not expecting to lose much so I’m clearing the whole driveway this evening. A few hours of warm sectoring may clear up the driveway if I do that. 

[tamarack]

A wintry look this morning.

 

[Zeppy]

Yep, midwinter feel since Thanksgiving, but forecast has 15hrs over 40 with 2" rain. Once again, a snowy December and a brown icy Christmas 

[klw]

3.4 inches last night.   

[DavisStraight]

5 hours ago, mreaves said:

Similar here.  As I said last night, I left my driveway untouched in case of freezing rain figuring tomorrow will reset it to bare gravel anyway.

I didn't touch the few inches we had the other day; it was icy for a couple days but now down to asphalt. Would love to fire the snowblower up soon though.

[DavisStraight]

4 hours ago, tamarack said:

A wintry look this morning.

 

Is that your house Tam? Looks like a Maine home to me.

[tamarack]

52 minutes ago, DavisStraight said:

Is that your house Tam? Looks like a Maine home to me.

Yup, nearest thing to a Maine camp we'll ever own, on 80 acres.  Nearest neighbor is 500' away.  It looks like a log cabin, but the L.C. Andrews homes are stick framed with 3-sided Northern white cedar logs for the exterior.  Built in 1975 (by a first-time home builder and it shows) it has 3x4 studs at 2-foot spacing.  By the turn of the century they changed to 3x6; our walls are 7-8" thick so the newer models are really robust.  We're at the end of the maintained road (2,000 feet from pavement) though high-clearance vehicles can travel the 3/4-mile of unmaintained if/until the snow gets too deep.  16" at the stick but 2 pickups came thru today.

[AstronomyEnjoyer]

Some pics around the yard this afternoon. I tend to do CAD really well here, so we'll see how much hangs around by Thursday.

[wokeupthisam]

Not expecting any of this snow to be here by Thurs - high dews with high winds are prolific pack erasers.  Hopefully can get something to pop around the 20-21st to refresh and then hold it thru Christmas week.

[powderfreak]

10 hours ago, dendrite said:

Deep winter. Pack is into the double digits. 

What a solid stretch since Thanksgiving.  A good run before the inevitable cutter.

[DavisStraight]

2 hours ago, wokeupthisam said:

Not expecting any of this snow to be here by Thurs - high dews with high winds are prolific pack erasers.  Hopefully can get something to pop around the 20-21st to refresh and then hold it thru Christmas week.

Hopefully hold it until April.

[J.Spin]

Between so much great skiing and being extra busy with work, I haven’t been able to keep up with mountain reports, but I’ve finally had a chance to put together the report on Sunday’s outing at Bolton. My older son and I headed up together for some turns, and since the resort has been offering lift-served skiing off Wilderness now, we decided to do some touring down at Timberline. With Timberline’s lower elevations, the snowpack wasn’t really reading for touring earlier in the season, but with day after day of snow during the week, and the depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake pushing 40 inches, the snowpack depths just continued to climb at all elevations. At our house at 500’ in the Winooski Valley, the snowpack had hit 14 inches, so we knew Timberline at 1,500’+ was more than ready to support some quality ski touring.

Indeed, Timberline was ready for prime time – at least in terms of overall snowpack depth if not yet its subsurface base depths or the density gradient of the snowpack. Down around 1,500’ at the Timberline Base, the snowpack depth was 20 inches, so that was plenty of snow for skiing. But unlike much of the snowpack up at the main mountain, there wasn’t really any settled base below that snow. So, there was a bit less flexibility in terrain choice, assuming you wanted to ski reasonably safely or didn’t want to risk damaging equipment, but it’s more than enough coverage for the mowed/maintained trails. The only other issue with the snowpack was that the powder was of roughly equal density throughout its depth. It certainly wasn’t upside down, but without a density increase as you go down, skis are prone to sink quite far, and you can get bogged down or experience tip submersions. We’d both brought 115 mm fat skis, so that really helped to mitigate that issue in terms of overall floatation and the ability to have fun on any lower-angle terrain, but it’s something to consider when you’re choosing which equipment to use for an outing. We saw some folks out on snow surfers, and I bet these were fun with decent floatation as long as they were on slope of sufficient pitch.

We got out in the morning because we knew that there was the chance for temperatures to go above freezing later in the day, but if temperatures did go above 32 F, it seemed to be just marginally. I’ve mentioned in some of my recent reports that we’ve needed a consolidation event for the snowpack in certain areas, so in that respect this warmer storm that came into the area today has been helpful, but getting an inch of liquid as dense snow would of course have been superior to getting it as rain. I can’t say if this will be a net gain for liquid in the snowpack down here at our site yet, but if it’s questionable here in the valley, it could easily be a liquid equivalent increase for some of the elevations. The mountains are expected to switch back over to snow shortly, and then the snow is supposed to work its way down in elevation over the next few hours, so we’ll have a chance to see how things settled out by tomorrow.

[J.Spin]

On 12/5/2024 at 9:58 PM, bwt3650 said:

Could you whip up some of your snowfall stats tmrw to see how we are doing compared to other years? I know the Mansfield stake is useful, but your stats are usually spot on to paint the picture.

As I mentioned in my recent mountain report, things have been busy between skiing and work, but this most recent system has helped with a little downtime to get some numbers together.

For the winter season thus far at our site, the only thing holding it back from really tracking with some of the top dogs has been November. Snowfall for November here in the valley was about a foot below average, so that really set things behind. You can see this in the blue line in the first plot below – the cumulative snowfall plot was rather flat with only minimal accumulations from various warmer/smaller storms until the end of the month when it finally began to rise. It certainly wasn’t a bottom of the barrel November, but it’s been a decade since we’ve had a November with less snow than this one, so that says something. I don’t really track temperatures, but it was pretty warm for a good chunk of the month. Last season, the tenor of November was vastly different. The snowstorms began churning from the first of the month, and of course the cumulative snowfall plot started climbing right from that point as well. You can see that in the red line in the second plot below. We never really blasted well away from average November snowfall pace, but we stayed at or above it for the whole month and overall, it at least came in as a solid/decent snowfall month. You can really see the contrast in snowfall between this November (blue) and last November (red) on that second plot though; this November just started really late. With all that said, this season did give us our 9^th white Thanksgiving in a row here at the house. That’s the longest white Thanksgiving streak in our data set, and it now bumps the average/odds for white Thanksgiving here close to 80% by the numbers.

In contrast to November, this December’s snowfall has been strong thus far. That immediately jumps out if you look at the blue line on either the first or second plot – it simply takes off after November 30^th, and you can see how it crosses the 2023 red line and pulls well ahead of average snowfall pace (white dotted line). We had over 30 inches of snow here in the valley in just the first 10 days of December this year, and it’s easy math to see where the month would end up if snowfall stayed at that pace for 30+ days – that would take the top spot in my December records. Obviously, it’s hard to maintain that snowfall pace for an entire month as our most recent system shows, but the thing is, this December’s snowfall thus far came with no large storms – it was just that modest bread and butter pattern that the GFS showed as we talked about a week or two ago. We’ve had six storms during this season’s initial December stretch, and the largest was only 8.2 inches. Although not directly relevant to this season, the second plot really shows how December played out last season – snowfall just tanked after mid-month, and you can see that nearly flat red line that quickly dropped behind average snowfall pace. In just its first week, this December’s snowfall surpassed last December’s snowfall for the entire month.

The third plot below has the cumulative snowfall data for our site for the past five seasons, since you were wondering how we are doing compared to other years. You can see that this season is actually outpacing all of the previous four after this early December run. So, if it’s felt like the first 10 days of December put on a good showing – the data say that they did. And again, that’s with no massive synoptic storms or stationary closed lows sitting to our northwest, just a steady diet of bread and butter. Bread and butter is just that, sort of the typical, staple pattern, so imagine if the mountains just simply had that for an entire season.

And finally, the fourth plot below has all the data from my data set so that you can see where this season sits with respect to all the others. This season actually stands in a solid position (fourth overall) at this early stage, but the real big dogs are typically ones that couple together a solid November and December, and you can see those topping the chart.

Anyway, the current ongoing precipitation has already changed over to snow here in the local mountains, and snow levels should be dropping to the valley floors over the next couple of hours, so we should continue tacking on to the current December snowfall numbers.

For the local resorts, I’ve got the updates on their snowfall progress similar to what I posted a few days ago. Jay Peak is currently at 99 inches of snowfall on the season, so they’re running at 99”/54” = 183% of average snowfall pace. Bolton Valley is reporting 55 inches of snowfall on the season, so they’re running at 55”/49” = 112% of average snowfall pace. Jay Peak has dropped back a bit from where they were when I last checked, of course they were running around 200% of average, and it’s going to be incredibly hard to keep up a pace like that. Bolton has actually picked up their pace from the last update, since they were at 105%.

[dmcginvt]

how do we get access to vt-ws-19? 

[dmcginvt]

Do I need to join coop?  Because Im not getting up at 7am

[J.Spin]

10 hours ago, dmcginvt said:

how do we get access to vt-ws-19? 

 

10 hours ago, dmcginvt said:

Do I need to join coop?  Because Im not getting up at 7am

VT-WS-19 is the number for our reporting station through CoCoRaHS, and all the data are publicly available through their site – PF often posts their maps of rain, snowfall, snowpack, etc. here in the forum. A number of people in the forum are members:

https://cocorahs.org/

It’s not as involved as being a reporter for an NWS Coop site – there are fewer of those. And I believe CoCoRaHS likes morning observations with a preference for reporting somewhere in the 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. range (the preferred specific time to submit CoCoRaHS precipitation data is 7 AM, but you can report whenever works for you, and many people do). If I recall correctly, I think Tamarack has his own time for reporting during the day, to keep his data consistent with what he had been doing for years.

[dendrite]

Beautiful, sunny day in the 40s but still a 4-5” depth for now. 
 

[backedgeapproaching]

1 hour ago, dendrite said:

Beautiful, sunny day in the 40s but still a 4-5” depth for now. 
 

 Normal DEC here, decent snow that gets wiped clean...

 

[J.Spin]

After the relatively warm midweek storm moved across the area, we picked up an inch or two of snow in the valley between the back side of that system and the lake-effect snow that followed it. While the storm wasn’t quite a net gain for the snowpack here at our site, we only lost a couple tenths of an inch of snow water equivalent in the snow on the ground, so it was fairly inconsequential in that regard. It did mean a thaw-freeze cycle for the snowpack though, so once temperatures came down, the snowpack was solid with just a bit of fresh snow on top. This was the first notable consolidation event of the season at our site, so we finally transitioned to a much more robust snowpack down at the house now vs. what was there before. It had slowly been settling and consolidating on its own, but it was still somewhat dry, and you could dig down to the ground fairly easily.

That midweek storm was likely a net gain for liquid in the mountain snowpack, but I assumed off piste surfaces would be quite hard after the thaw-freeze, similar to what we experience down in the valley. I’d been hearing some good reports out of the mountains with regard to the backside accumulations from the storm, but it was hard to image it would be enough to really get the off piste and backcountry conditions back to where there were earlier in the week.

With that in mind, my wife and I headed up to Bolton Valley for some snowshoeing on Saturday. We always find that snowshoeing is a nice change of pace if the snowpack is likely to be punchy, crusty, or icy, since even Nordic skiing with those conditions can be unpleasant if the snow is too firm. We figured we’d mostly be using the crampons on our snowshoes during the tour as we expected something in the range of a dust-on-crust snowpack, but that wasn’t the case at all. I was amazed to find that at around the 2,000’-2,200’ elevations where we toured, there were 6 to 10 inches of powder above the base layers. And, the base wasn’t even rock hard, it was a crumbly interface with the powder above it that made for excellent touring. We couldn’t believe that we were actually having to use the floatation of our snowshoes because of the depth of the powder, and the crampons were needed only occasionally in packed areas. The resort was reporting 8 inches of new snow in the past 48 hours, and it really wasn’t just eye candy, all that new snow set up some very pleasant snow surfaces.

The only major issues we noted on Saturday were that some of the water bars had been blow out by the rain. Those areas required some extra navigation, and we could see that people had established routes around them on popular ascents like the Bryant Trail. I’d say our observations were right in line with the big washout on Gondolier at Stowe that Powderfreak talked about – the snowpack itself wasn’t damaged all the much by the rain, the more notable effects were on drainage/water bars.

Experiencing the quality of the snow on Saturday, it was obvious that the powder skiing would be great on low to moderate angle terrain, so my son and I headed out for a ski tour on Bolton’s Nordic & Backcountry Network on Sunday. We toured up the Bryant Trail to about the base of the Big Blue area. We wanted to stick to more moderate and low-angle terrain that was a best fit for the depth and density of the powder, so we began our descent in the lower reaches of Big Blue, then worked our way through the relatively low-angle terrain between the Bryant and Coyote trails. Later on the descent we crossed to the west side of Bryant, skied the upper sections of the Cup Runneth Over glade, and finished out with turn on the untracked areas of World Cup. The resort hadn’t set formal Nordic grooming tracks up in those areas of World Cup, but there was a track line that had been made by skiers, and the rest of the trail was untracked powder. Those areas of World Cup were very open and provided some of the most consistent powder turns of the day. The pitch was also perfect for the depth and consistency of the powder, and my son said those sections were actually his favorite turns of the tour.

[mreaves]

I lost more snow yesterday that I did in the deluge last week.  Looks like we get a bit of a refresher tonight.  My NWS point and click is calling for 2"-4"