2-3 inches of Snow Fell in the Last 24 hours Making for Even Sweeter Conditions for this Weekend!

A Cold and Snowy Thursday gives way to a sunny Friday that should last all weekend long! If you have a trip planned for this weekend that includes a visit to one of the ski areas of the Southeast or Mid Atlantic you are going to be impressed with some awesome conditions.

As Meteorologist Brad Panovich shared with us yesterday, we are now on our 14th straight day of below average temperatures today! This morning’s low in Banner Elk was -1° and a lot of the area saw moderate to light snowfall for much of the day on Thursday.

Be sure to check out Brad’s Weekend Skier’s Forecast on the FRONT page of www.SkiSoutheast.com and for those unaware, you should always hop over to SkiSoutheast.com after reading up on SkiNC.com because there’s always additional reports and news for ALL of the Southeastern and Mid Atlantic ski areas, different photos of the day and of course Brad’s video forecast!

CHECK THE SLOPE REPORTS PAGE for all of the details as we only cover some highlights this morning. Click here for> North Carolina Ski Reports

SOME BRIEF HIGHLIGHTS

Appalachian Ski Mountain – They bottomed out at 3° this morning and saw a TRACE to 1/2" of snow in the last 24 hours and awesome snowmaking overnight. They have the guns off for skiing and riding "unimpaired" (without snowmaking) today! They are 100% open and offer both terrain parks and ice skating as well.

Additionally if you’re wanting to get some skiing in AND attend this weekend’s Blowing Rock Winterfest, App is right in the midst of all of the fun!

For all of the fun planned for Winterfest, click here? Blowing Rock Winterfest 

Hawksnest Resort – It’s 2°up at The Hawks this morning and they are reporting 2" or so of natural snow from Thursday and conditions could not be better for their 9 trails, snowtubing lanes and Night Hawk fun this evening.

Also Justin Grimes wrote, "We will host the United States College Ski Association Races at Hawksnest on Saturday! The Southeastern Division of the United States College Ski Association will compete Saturday, January 26 and Sunday, January 27 at Hawksnest Ski Resort, located atop Seven Devils, North Carolina."

The Southeastern Division of USCSA is comprised of university and college race teams from North Carolina and adjoining states. Annually, the Division holds several race events at ski resorts on the east coast, sponsoring events in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina.

The USCSA is the sports federation for collegiate team ski racing and snowboard competition in America.

"We are very pleased to be hosting the USCSA", said Lenny Cottom, owner of Hawksnest Resort. "Our Sock-em-dog slope will be groomed into a boadercross/skicross course."

Approximately 200 college racers will participate. On Sunday, the collegiate athletes will compete in a Giant Slalom.

Let’s see…great skiing and riding conditions at Hawksnest for the weekend, WONDERFUL weather and you can also take in some race watching! Sounds like a weekend of fun to me!

Ski Beech, Hawksnest and Sugar each reported 2-4" of new snow from Thursday’s storm and we’re seeing official reports from Baker Perry’s snow measuring network of 1.5" of snow on Beech and around the area. The tops of Sugar, Beech and Hawksnest all looked to have picked up 2-3" despite those official reports.

The cold spot for the High Country also appears to be -2.5° this morning atop Sugar Mountain. We’re going to HAVE to get a weather station on top of Ski Beech because the station atop Sugar has consistently reported temps that are 2° colder than the one on Beech all season. The difference is Sugar HAS a station up top and Ski Beech does not.

BEHIND ON POSTS, VIDEOS, CONTESTS…JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING!

We have a ton of photos and videos to share with you guys and we’ll try to post a bunch of those today. We’ve also received some nice trail reports that we’ll get up and running as well.

Some people have asked us about when we plan to post the contests that we normally run each season. The truth? We have been kind of holding off because it was such a "spotty" start to the ski season that we didn’t want to "award" contests with less that decent conditions, AND we really don’t feel great about putting a lot of people skiing and riding FREE on the slopes at our resorts when many of those resorts can use every PAYING customer possible.

Now that things are looking darn nice, we’re considering our options and we have a lot of lodging and cabin rental partners who have already agreed to give away weekends of fun. So stay tuned for a few days longer as we make some decisions about how we may play out February and March!

We also have some plans in the making of potentially hosting a HUGE SKISOUTHEAST.COM Weekend in early March! We have some sweet ideas and just need to see if we can wrap things up pronto and make it happen.

So STAY TUNED!

WEBCAMS and SKI NETWORK TRAFFIC IS HUGE!!!

Yesterday I received a call from Nascar Veteran Rusty Wallace. He called to share the fact that he is on our webcam pages regularly. He said, "Mike, I got to tell ya (that’s how he talks) I really love the heck out of those mountains and I usually get on there and look around and see if you guys got snow and stuff."

"Rusty sightings" are common around Banner Elk as he has had a mountaintop home over off of Hickory Nut Gap Road that overlooks the old T.E. Smith Christmas Tree farm. He shared that he sold that home last year and now has a mountain home up on Linville Ridge. We will be putting a LIVE webcam up there soon and Wallace stated that he wouldn’t mind sharing his views with HighCountryWebCam visitors once he get that one running.

John Carter with WBT News in Charlotte called Thursday as did Patrick Jones with the N.C. Department of Tourism representing VisitNC.com…so the cold and snowy period that has made for PERFECT conditions at our ski resorts has everyone looking in! The cams page yesterday saw record traffic, as did both SkiNC.com and SkiSoutheast.com! We’ll share more on that at another time.

Go enjoy the day and…THINK COLD AND SNOW!!!

See You On The Slopes!