Let’s Get Ready to R—a—m—b—l—e!
Sunday’s are my day to dish the Southeastern and mid-Atlantic ski & snowboarding news pretty much however I want to do so. Okay, to be honest, I’m blessed to be able to do that every day. However, on most days I DO ATTEMPT to have some organization to the details. Not so much on Sundays when I’m lazy and just allow my brain to flitter around from one ski mountain to another and flow to my fingers to the keyboard.
THAT reminds me of a time, several years ago, when I ticked off a local ski area staffer and he taped up a poster board in front of one of the webcams saying, “Mike Doble is a keyboard princess.”
As they say, we’ve come a long way baby. However, as you can tell, calling ME a keyboard princess does a huge injustice to all of the real, keyboard princesses of the world!
(I warned you guys that I am rambling today. If you’re not too bored, keep reading. (…and thank those of you who do.))
Let’s Start With the Bad News / Good News
The bad news is that we are seeing a VERY wet start to our Sunday here in the Southeast. That means that the base snow across the entire region WILL BE “Wet Granular”, and pretty soft. There’s ALSO two pieces of good news. One is that we didn’t get as MUCH rain as was forecasted earlier. Some forecasts had most of the ski mountain communities picking up one-half-inch or more of “under-developed snow”.
It seems like Cataloochee Ski Area, Maggie Valley and MY HOME (here in Sleepy Hollow) saw the most precipitation overnight.
0.53″ Maggie Valley
0.35″ My Home in Sleepy Hollow
0.27″ Sugar Mountain Resort
0.25″ Appalachian Ski Mountain
0.24″ Canaan Valley Resort & Timberline Mountain
0.21″ Beech Mountain
0.16″ Blowing Rock
0.12″ Friday Wisp
0.02″ Winterplace
0.02″ Massanutten
0.04″ Massanutten
It is STILL raining currently, as of 7:40am, however, that IS supposed to clear on out at around 11am and reveal sunny skies. Ditto that forecast for the ski mountains into Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland – except that it might take until around noon-1pm or so to “sunny up”.
Editor’s note (10:13am) – it is already clearing up. yay!
So ALL is not so bad.
Cooler air arrives tomorrow. Other than a few sprinkles on the western side of the Appalachians, we stay dry until the next bout of rain arrives mid-week. Much colder air comes behind this system on Thursday but temperatures will moderate quickly as we head into the weekend. We should see some good snowmaking temperatures Wednesday night and most, if not all day on Thursday and again Thursday night with overnight lows (both nights) in the teens.
Can you say, “base reparations”?
Check the Snow Report for all of the resort AND slope details.
Notables:
I LOVE me some Omni Homestead Resort. They know how to do Christmas right. Check out this video share from WSLS 10 News.
Also HERE is a wonderful, Christmas video from a couple of years ago showing just how magical Omni Homestead Resort is at Christmas (and of course any time of year)!
Photo of the Day since it was a RAINY Sunday Morning is from Omni Homestead Resort…at Christmas
I LOVE this marketing statement out of Snowshoe Mountain:
Yesterday’s sunshine is long gone and we’ve got some wind and rain hanging out today. A wind advisory is in place throughout the day. Snow conditions will still be great if you’re up for it – just make sure you’ve got a good, waterproof outer shell and you’ll be good to go. If you’re noticing that your gear isn’t as waterproof as it once was, stop by one of our retail shops in the village and treat yourself to an early Christmas present.
Wisp Resort also shared:
Remember: there is no such thing as bad weather when you have the proper gear.
Honorable Mention Goes to Appalachian Ski Mountain which posted: “(We have) the most fickle weather on the east coast.”
Beech Mountain Resort posted THIS opening day reel…
As you can see, it was quite wet up there but it seemed that guests had a blast as several people posted nice comments on Facebook.
As we get into Monday (and the week ahead) you guys will want to keep an eye on our SNOW REPORT because several of the ski areas may opt to temporarily shut down ski & snowboarding ops to save their base depths and await the great snowmaking temps that are headed our way Wednesday night.
Timberline Mountain had previously made that very decision early on and not due to the weather, but simply because this is so early in the season that it makes more since to conserve during the mid-week and focus on the weekends.
Here’s Timberline’s statement to that effect:
Timberline Mountain will suspend operations from Monday 11/28 to Thursday 12/1. This brief closure will allow our team to put the finishing touches on some of our systems and infrastructure. We plan to open for skiing and snowboarding on Friday 12/2 for the early season!
Massanutten Resort also reported:
We will be closed 11.28 – 12.1.22 for skiing/riding and snow tubing with the plan to re-open tubing on Friday, 12.2.22 and skiing/riding for 12.3.22 and 12.4.22 depending on how the snow holds up this week. Snowmaking temps are forecasted for later this week.
Look for other ski areas to close up this week and reopen Friday and Saturday.
WHY? JUST WHY?! WHY DO YOU GUYS AND GALS GET YOUR SKI NEWS ANYWHERE ELSE?
I got a few emails from Wednesday through this morning from people planning to travel to the mountains for a last minute, Thanksgiving, Christmas tree hunting – ski and snowboarding getaway. They figured they would mix in some opportunities to make some turns on the slopes. Here are a couple of the more interesting emails:
Hey. my girlfriend and i wanted to drive up to do some Christmas tree shopping and thought we’d ski too. I just found your website after googling and getting conflicting reports so i guess you could say i’m a first time visitor. i thought you should know that after seeing one website reporting wolf laurel as closed, i found your website claiming they were open. so i called the ski resort and the lady answering the phone told me that the only news to trust was you guys. thought you’d appreciate that coming from a ski resort person.
Another –
Guys, is SkiSoutheast the official website for the ski resorts? I live in Charlotte and saw a commercial a while back that directed people to goskinc. I know ya’ll used to be skinc.com so I wondered. I’m a fan, but confused. – Janet and Rob Rawlings
No confusion intended Janet. Each state operates their own official website. GoSkiNC.com is the production for the NC Ski Areas Association just as GoSkiWV.com is for the West Virginia Ski Areas Association.
SkiSoutheast.com is independent from these and other reporting websites. Almost all of the ski areas in the region DO support us and advertise with us. We’re not sure WHY the NC Ski Areas spends money to promote GoSkiNC.com since they literally get around 200 visitors a month going to that website and that is probably the ski areas logging in to post morning snow reports. We noticed that back in November of 2021 they spent a TON of money with Google Ads and television commercials to get people to go to the website to no avail. Your email prompted ME to have a look this morning and several of the resorts reports were wrong. In addition to showing Wolf Ridge as CLOSED, they show Cataloochee open with 6 trails and last updated November 16th.
Your honor and people of the court (you guys, our readers) we rest our case.
Simply stated, no other ski & snowboarding report service or website in the United States covers the sixteen ski areas of the Southeast and mid-Atlantic like SkiSoutheast.com does. When you combine that with our sister website – ResortCams.com – you get all the news and intel you need to make a perfect decision as to where and when to spend your hard-earned money on a ski & snowboarding getaway.
Editor’s Note: Admittedly when I received those emails I went into “stats-attack” mode and clipped all sorts of data to “go into a mind-numbing, data, sharing mode”. I thought better of it and will simply leave it as shared above.
Say Hello to “Blizzard”.
I traded my Ford f-150 in yesterday for this new, Chevy “High Country” truck. With 137k miles on my Ford and with some transmission issues surfacing, I bit the bullet and chose my new ride. I’ve now gone from a Dodge Ram truck, to a Red Chevy Truck, to my old f-150 (nicknamed “Whitey” as in Whitey Ford, the old ball player) and now back to a Chevy. I liked the new ride for many reasons, but will admit to loving that the trim package is called “High Country”. Since I LIVE in the High Country, it seemed appropriate. My wife and kids have ALWAYS named all of our vehicles so together, we came up with “Blizzard”, hoping to inspire some High Country blizzards this winter.
….FINALLY…Congrats to University of South Carolina, head coach, Shane Beamer, the entire football team and all Gamecock fans on the win over our arch-rival, Clemson University. They beat two top eight teams, back-to-back and in doing so also eliminated Tennessee and Clemson from the college football playoffs. Way to do Gamecocks.
Be sure to check out Joe Stevens’ Snow News is Good News post this morning where he mentions “artificial snow” and more. Click here to read it.
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