It’s SNOWING again! It is no longer November, so this snowfall will begin a tally towards how much we end up seeing in December! We’re off to a good start though! We reported yesterday that "the father of Southern skiing", Doc Brigham – who founded Beech, Sugar and Snowshoe Mountains (in that order) passed away this past week and was layed to rest on Sunday in Alabama. Doc had a close relationship with our Maker and since we all know that he loved snow and snow skiing so much that he developed three ski areas in the south – we HAVE to believe that he’s up there putting whatever influence he can on God to keep us covered in whatever snows and cold can make it our way!
We’ll jump right into our "tour around the region" this morning and get you right to the snow totals and more. Also be sure to check out the slope conditions link for all of the temps, snow totals (for the season) and more information.
Let’s go North to South today…
Wisp Resort is reporting 27° and a dusting of new snow to take their seasonal snow total to 28". They have 12 trails open (not the 13 that some reporting services are claiming this morning) and they are open for day skiing from 9am until 5pm today!
Canaan and Timberline Resorts are still not open for the season although Timberline will open later this week and canaan the week after. We’re certain that David Cooper up at Canaan Valley Ski Resort will send us some pics and an update as per the new snowfall totals and we’ll share that with as soon as we get it.
Snowshoe Mountain is only reporting a TRACE of new snow overnight but they will be getting more this week. They are reporting 25 trails open for day skiing. They are also making snow but only on closed trails – including Cupp Run!
Wintergreen, Massanutten and Bryce resorts were all open this past weekend, but are now closed under an "early season" schedule and will reopen on Saturday. Other reporting services are reporting that Wintergreen and Massanutten are open today and they are not.
Appalachian Ski Mountain is at 29°, reporting about 1" of new snow and 8 trails open for today. Both terrain parks and ice skating is open as well.
Cataloochee Ski Area is reporting 24° and light snow (around an inch) and 5 trails open for day and night skiing.
Hawksnest Tubing is reporting 2" of snow and they are open for tubing.
Ski Beech is at 22° and they are reporting 2" of new snow (19.5" on the season now) and they are open for day skiing on 5 trails. Beech is making snow as well.
HERE’S SOME GREAT NEWS FROM RYAN COSTIN UP AT BEECH!
Ski Beech is really excited about their new focus on bringing their product up to par with the best resorts in the region and Ryan Costin and crew have made a bold statement with the following that Ryan wrote me about on Saturday. He states, "Mike, we are offering a 50 percent discount on lift tickets to anyone with a valid season pass to any resort in the country."
GET THAT? No matter what resort you hold a season pass to in the entire country – bring it to Ski Beech and they will give you a lift pass for that day at ONE HALF the price!
Costin adds, "We think this will let people who ski/ride at other mountains come check out Beech again (or for the first time) and we think we’ll impress them enough to come back again!"
Sugar Mountain is reporting 1" of snow and 26°. They have 10 trails open for today and the outdoor ice rink will be open from 12:00pm until 6:00 today. Sugar is open for night skiing as well and since the kids in the area are out of school Snow day rates apply for the following schools: Avery & Watauga.
Wolf Ridge is closed until Friday when they will reopen for the season.
WE’RE SHOWING YOU THE SNOW LIVE VIA THE CAMS…
Just in Time for the Snow – HighCountryWebCams.com is on a NEW SERVER! Man we’ve been scrambling to get everything in place for this season. One of those upgrades was to get all of our cams updating on a new server that would allow for more traffic and less glitches in the way of cam freeze ups. We think we have that in place.
Check out the snowfall by clicking here> Beech Mountain Snowfall
The cam located slopeside can be cranked up even faster (if we reduce the screen size) to show updates every second or so. View the full sized shot right now as it updated every 2 seconds> Ski Beech WebCam
We will have all of the cams operational ASAP, but enjoy the more than 20 or so that are already updating on the new server. We’ve cranked a few of them up to show new images every second or two due to the new server speeds.
…and we have MORE live cams coming online later in the week! Speaking of LIVE, we are working with USRelay to enable a few of the more popular cameras to go "television live" sometime within the next 14 days. Stay tuned for that!
From the cams, we can see that Asheville/Black Mountain has a dusting this morning…as does Ashe County. Morganton has no snow and actually the sun is peaking through. (The Morganton cam does show some pretty Christmas Holiday lights at night!). Purchase Knob (in the Smokies) is showing a dusting of snow.
The Beech Mountain cams are showing some decent snow thus far. (About the same one inch that we’re seeing here in at my offices.) Hawksnest looks pretty snowy as well!
Check out all of the live webcams by clicking here> Live Ski Cams, Mountain Cams, Snow Cams
That’s it for today…
Send your photos, videos, trip reports and comments to: [email protected]