Another Georgeous Spring Day in the Neighborhood!

I don’t know about the "…sailor take warning" part of the old saying, but there WAS an amazing (and gorgeous) "red sky" this morning at about 7am or so across the High Country. The sun was coming up and the high cloud cover allowed the sun’s rays to leak underneath them, casting an awesome display with our beautiful mountains serving as a backdrop. Two words – simply awesome!

Mid 60° temperatures will be the order of this beautiful Spring day. Sunny skies and some sweet Spring skiing. There’s only four more days to enjoy carving the soft snow at all but one of our region’s ski areas. It has been a struggle of a season at times, but it looks like these last four days will be pretty nice. Saturday and Sunday are looking like a perfect setup for all of the ski area closing weekend activities. Be sure to check back over the last couple of days worth of updates as we have covered most all of the fun that is planned.

Click here to see Wednesday’s Update

You can also see several announcements (listed in the right column) of this page: Ski Resort Announcements

Next week is looking a bit on the wet side. We only mention that because Timberline is the lone resort that plans to ski on through April 6th. They may want to have a look at the National Weather Service forecast as rain, showers and thunder showers are in the mix from today, then Friday, Friday night, Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. (We haven’t seen the forecast beyond that.)

They have some April 5th and 6th plans of their own…so cancelling may not be an option…but it sure looks like they may want to close up this Sunday with all of the rest. (Can you tell that I am TRYING to influence them to do so – so that I can begin my "vacation" away from my ski-season duties???)

We’ll see….

Check the Slope Reports page for all of the details today> SkiSoutheast.com Slope Reports

 
MORE ON SNOWSHOE’S SNOWFALL TOTALS…

Yesterday we wrote about the fact that we were sticking with our tally of 133.3" of snow for Snowshoe Resort, which is what the official reporting station is providing. Snowshoe’s marketing peeps were under-reporting the snowfall for the season by about 14" and they have now "corrected" that by posting a figure of 127" (still 5" below ours.) That is certainly to their credit that they didn’t just jump on our reporting and go with it.

It was Greg Dobson (a GIS Research Associate, National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, University of North Carolina Asheville) who gave us the heads up and we reported it – Laura Parquette picked it up and checked Snowshoe’s math and found the errors and posted their new 127" tally.

…and now comes more input from experts who want to see US and Snowshoe "get it right". (You guys ARE the bomb. But you know that, right?)

Walter Doehring emailed me on Wednesday with some data right from NOAA. He posted the following:

SNOWSHOE (468308)
Monthly Totals/Averages
Snowfall (inches)
Years: 2007-2008

Season – 134.7"

Snowshoe’s 43" in the month of January was more snow than 12 of the region’s 17 ski areas received – ALL SEASON LONG!

Anyway, Laura…I’d go ahead and count the 134.7" as official. We are!

Thanks Walter for that input and confirmation. He also wrote, "Official data and data for additional locations and years are available from the Regional Climate Centers and the National Climatic Data Center."

SUGAR COULD STILL BE OPEN…kind of…okay MAYBE not today…but….

Sugar Mountain closed up after their day sessions on Tuesday, however we received numerous emails on Sunday and Monday from people complaining to us that we had purposely pointed the "Sugar Mountain Front" cam down towards the ground so that you guys could not see how "bad" Sugar looked just prior to closing.

Truthfully I simply ignored those emails because I had better things to do and more important things to worry about, but I was over at Extreme Snowboard and Ski Shop (across the street from Sugar and where the camera is hosted) and Brian Britton was telling me that several people had called them complaining that THEY were purposely pointing the camera to the ground "in cahoots with Gunther" (as one guy put it).

I couldn’t help but laugh because those that KNOW us, know that we go out of our way to show the conditions – no matter how GREAT or HOW BAD they may look. The fact is that this particular camera is located right on the road and catches all of the road salt and grime that comes with Winter. Over the years the gears in that camera have become "sticky" and over the weekend we had a short power outage/surge and that caused the camera to reset. When it does that, it points to the ground. We had logged on remotely five or six times attempting to move the camera back into position. It wouldn’t do it. It is just that simple.

I drove over yesterday and physically opened the camera housing, repointed it by hand and then logged in remotely this morning and repositioned it to it’s customary position.

Click the link below to see that if Sugar R-E-A-L-L-Y wanted to, they could groom and move some snow around and still be in decent shape. Kind of…

Sugar Mountain Web Camera

Hey, we’ve seen them open with less! As we have told you guys before – it is usually not a lack of base snow that causes resorts to close. It is a lack of people…

You people! Shame on you for thinking that we would "hold back" from you 🙂

Enjoy your day!

Until Next time…

Send your snow photos, videos, comments or emails to: [email protected]