3 to 6 Inches MORE SNOW hits the NC Ski Mountains!

First Trax

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…and we thought November was great! What a phenomenal way to jump start December! The ski areas of Western North Carolina all receive natural snow in the last 24 hours! Cataloochee leads the way in natural snow on Monday with 6" of new powder. Beech and Sugar Mountains reported 4". Appalachian reported 3". (Actually Sugar is only reporting 3" officially, which is one of the few times that we’ve ever seen their marketing staff report less natural snowfall than Beech. We’re not certainly if somebody else is doing the reporting today, but they were being unusually on the conservative side 🙂 We received three different reports of 4" of snow on Sugar Mountain so we’ll go with that.

As importantly, the frigid air returned and that had snowmaking crews cranking up yesterday and they have put down a ton of snow in the last 24 hours to help out nature’s 3-6" across the region. Snowmaking will continue today as highs are expected to stay in the 20s. So we’ll see yet another, early season bit of around-the-clock snowmaking.

We have had an awesome start to this ski season and there’s no better way to judge that than to see where we are right now – compared to ALL of last season in terms of natural snowfall. You can do this yourself ANYTIME by simply clicking on ANY ski resort link. The resulting page will tell you how much snow a resort has already seen to date. Then scroll down a bit on that same page and you can see how much snow that resort had last season and previous seasons – as well as their average over most ten year periods.

We believe that we are THE ONLY resource that provides this data…so remember that you can "do it yourself" anytime. However, since we teased you with that information today, we’ll do the homework for you as a way of showing how we’re doing with this great start!

How’s THIS for a start???!!!

Resort                    This season    All Last Season    Yearly
Appalachian                   14"                       17"                 50"
Cataloochee                  14"                        26"                 40"
Ski Beech                      22"                       38"                 80"
Sugar Mtn                      21"                       35"                 78"
Wolf Ridge                     14"                       32"                 65"

As you can see, most resorts are already approaching the TOTAL snowfall for all of last season (and actually a few seasons prior) AND are well on their way (about 25-30%) towards their full seasonal snowfall!

We keep saying it, but what a GREAT, GREAT start to the 2008-2009 ski and snowboarding season in North Carolina!

Some Resort Notes:

Be sure to check out the slope conditions link for all of the resort slope opening and schedules. However, here are a few notables:

We featured a nice shot of grooming at Ski Beech as our Photo of the Day today! Ryan Costin has been staying in touch with us and conditions up there are great! They plan on opening more terrain real soon and we’ll keep you informed.

Sugar Mountain wants you to remember that since school is out again today that Snow Day rates are in effect for the students and teachers of the following counties: Ashe, Avery, Carter, Johnson, Mitchell, and Watauga. Don’t forget to bring your valid proof of residency in order to receive your Snow Day discount.

We’ve also received some emails from you guys that we are "taking up valuable space" by keeping Hawksnest and Scaly Mountain within our slope conditions pages. It is being suggested that we move those two off our grid. We’ll probably move them to the bottom, but there’s enough interest in tubing to keep them on it…and who knows, maybe someone will come along and pay Mr. cottom his asking price and reopen things for skiing again someday. HEY! IT COULD HAPPEN!

WEBCAMS…and other news…

The WebCams are all updating non-stop on the new server! That is great news since yesterday you guys visited the site in huge numbers. There’s no test better than seeing 24,911 visitors hit www.HighCountrywebcams.com on Monday! The new video server handled it perfectly. We’ll add a few more cameras to the mix this week and we’re excited to see what kind of visitation we get then!

Thanks to Thomas Steeg and Will Ferris of USRelay. We’ve been in the talking stages for nearly a year about them taking over a few of our cameras and they are doing some testing right now and we may take one of the resort, slopeside cameras LIVE as early as today. They are excited about working with us as well.

Since I am in the "thank you" mode – thanks to Joe Miller of the News and Observer over in Raleigh. Joe does us a great service my including us in his column with great frequency and he was telling me yesterday that he adds a link in his blog even more often to send new visitors to the newspaper over to us. Thanks again Joe. You can read Joe’s Blog at: blogs.newsobserver.com/joemiller – He covers all sorts of subjects including hiking, biking (and of course skiing) in his "Get Out and Get Fit" blog.

Since we’re into numbers this morning, I checked Urchin (our stats package on the new server) and yesterday we saw another 40K+ day this early in the season! We received 45,112 unique visitors and you guys viewed 282,412 pages of content! That is the second highest visitor total that we’ve seen on or before December 1st. (We had a record 48,000+ visitors a week or so ago.) With those kinds of numbers it is obvious that we have two more "people" to thank. First, thanks to the more than 60 television stations that talk about us from time to time and special thanks to Brad Panovich, Matthew East and other meteorologists who regularly include a mention of SkiNC and SkiSoutheast on the air. Second, thanks to YOU, our visitors who give us your time. Spread the word for us, will you?

For more ski news for ALL of the Southeast and Mid Atlantic ski resorts click over to www.SkiSoutheast.com  

Send your photos, videos, trip reports and comments to: [email protected]

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