Joe Stevens posted his third annual "Snowies" yesterday and if you didn’t read them, be sure to check them out under his "Joe Knows Snow" column. Mother Nature sent a rare-this-season "award" of "snowies" on Monday and then again overnight last night. Snow began to fall here and across much of the region around noon on Monday and the snow was rather heavy at times. It created an almost instant dusting of snow and some mountaintops reported an inch of new snow.
The sun came out as skies cleared later in the afternoon and then late yesterday evening another burst of snow hit the area and left a light blanket of snow that has everything white this morning.
Is That ALL you Got, Mama Nature?
We’ve already reported the fact that this season has been subpar in terms of the amount of snowfall we’ve seen this year (unless your resort is located in Tucker County West Virginia!). Canaan and Timberline Resorts received 98% of their normal (150") of snow – however the rest of the ski areas of the Southeast and Mid Atlantic only saw from 20-86% of normal with the region as a whole picking up 63% of it’s usual natural snowfall.
Click here to see the details on> Southeast Ski Area Snowfall for 2007-2008
Ma Nature seems to like dusting the area with snow on or one day after a resort closes. The day after Ski Beech closed for the season, it snowed. Then several ski areas closed for the season this past Sunday – and it snowed yesterday. Sugar and Massanutten are closing today – it snows overnight. Someone less intelligent might think that the grand old lady of nature is wiggling her finger and saying "Oh no you didn’t!"
One look at the long range weather reports and it’s a safe bet that we’ve seen the last burst of snow and cold of this ski season. We’ll see some temperatures reaching into the 50s and even into the 65° range by Friday afternoon into several areas of the Southeast mountains. Forecasters are predicting temps near 80° at many "flat lander" locations so we can stick a fork in the 2007-2008 ski season as we’re pretty much done.
While Timberline Resort in West Virginia vows to remain open until April 6th, all of the rest of the ski areas of the Southeast and Mid Atlantic will call it quits 6 days from now on Sunday, March 30th. (Two will close after today’s ski sessions.) With a dusting of snow and two days worth of snowmaking for those who wanted to do it…conditions will be darn nice today and through the remaining days of the 2007-2008 ski season.
Appalachian Ski Mountain made snow Sunday night, Monday morning and again last night. They look m-a-r-v-e-l-o-u-s today. They are 100% open for day skiing only. Somehow we missed the fact that they switched to day skiing only now for this last week. Sorry for an inconvenience to any of you who tried skiing there last night. (Thanks to AJ Henderson of Boone for bringing that to our attention. You are da man AJ!)
Cataloochee also made snow and is open with groomed (very nice) conditions on 5 trails for today from 1pm-10pm.
Sugar Mountain ends their season today at 4:30pm. They are not open for night skiing although the SSAA is reporting that they are. They offer 10 trails for day skiing and they will close the season with a "Boss Hawg ‘Snow Burning’" ceremony at 4pm today.
VIRGINIA RESORT NEWS:
Massanutten has already replaced the snowy images on the front of their website with the green images of Spring and Summer. They will end their season today at 5pm and are offering 50% of their terrain today. They will have 7 trails open today.
The rest of the Virginia Ski Areas are closed for snow sports.
WEST VIRGINIA SKI NEWS:
Snowshoe Mountain picked up 1.5" of new snow and that takes them to 118.5" of snow on the season according to our tally (pulled from their official reporting station). More on that in a second. They offer 32 trails for today and will end their season with temps in the 60° temps this weekend.
Greg Dobson, is a regular contributor for us, and a GIS Research Associate, with the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, at the University of North Carolina Asheville. That’s a fancy title for a guy involved with mountain enviromental studies and he often sends us some very cool content about snowfalls and other weather related events.
Last week, after we posted the season snowfall totals he wrote us this very interesting bit of data about Snowshoe Mountain’s snow totals.
"Mike, Great comments (on our story) …I was noticing on the NWS Charleston WV page that they are actually showing more snowfall for the Coop station located at Snowshoe (133.3) than Snowshoe themselves are reporting (116)!
The Coop station is quality controlled and should be considered to be fairly accurate. It is the data that will get archived at NCDC. If this is the case, that would give Snowshoe an additional 15 inches, not a lot, but would certainly up their seasonal percentage of normal that you reported yesterday. Seems Snowshoe would want to report every inch they can!!
Thanks for that insight Greg and you’re right!
According to the official reporting stations, Snowshoe has seen 134.3" of snow as compared to their reported 118". Hats off to Snowshoe for actually UNDER reporting.
In fact, according to the same reporting station, Snowshoe actually received 3" of snow as compared to the 1.5" in the last 24 hours that Laura and crew reported.
See the following government links:
http://www.weather.gov/view/productview.php?pil=RLXHYDRLX&version=1&num=5
http://www.weather.gov/view/productview.php?pil=RLXHYDRLX&version=0
Timberline Resort has 26 trails open for today and picked up some snowfall as well. (Sorry for the short report on these guys…but we won’t receive their report until later in the morning.)
Winterplace Resort saw a TRACE of new snow and 22°. They have 27 of 28 trails open for today!
Wisp Resort in Garrett County Maryland is open today with 28 trails and what should be some very nice conditions.
Until Next time…
Be sure to visit www.SkiSoutheast.com for more news from the rest of the Southeast and Mid Atlantic ski areas!
Send your snow photos, videos, comments or emails to: [email protected]