…and MORE is falling!
Admit it! All you guys REALLY want to know is who had how much snow today! Am I right?!?! We are fortunate here on SkiSoutheast to be able to obtain good, accurate intel from the ski areas (smile), some official Cocorahs reporters, and reliable sources at or within spitting distance of the ski areas and as of 7:30am here are those numbers!
Appalachian Ski Mountain – 16"
Beech Mountain Resort – 14"
Cataloochee Ski Area – 12"
Sugar Mountain Resort – 14"
Wolf Ridge Resort – 10"
Sapphire Valley Ski – 5"
Wisp Resort – 4"
Snowshoe Mountain – 17"
Canaan Valley Resort & Conference Center – 16"
Timberline Resort – 16"
Winterplace Resort – 17"
Massanutten Resort – 14"
Wintergreen Resort – 24"
Bryce Resort – 10"
Ober Gatlinburg – 8 to 10"
Expect POW POW no matter where you head this morning! Be careful as roads are snow covered but drivable with 4WD and good tires. We have links to all of the DOT departments within each ski area available by clicking here> Ski Resort Road Conditions
We spoke with Brad Moretz at Appalachian Ski Mountain early this morning and he said their guys kept salting and working their entrance road all night and they probably have some of the best driving conditions of any of the ski areas today.
Wintergreen Resort in Virginia looks to be the top snow total we’ve seen so far with 24" of snow and they are digging out this morning and actually advising people not to travel there today. They are advising travellers to Wintergreen to wait until Sunday to come!
MORE SNOW IS FALLING!
According to some weather peeps the BIG SNOW is over in North Carolina and most of the Virginia mountains with the numbers that we’re seeing up top about it for now. MORE SNOW is forecasted to wrap around and come in tonight with perhaps as much as 4" more snow coming in.
<Map compliments of Accuweather
Ski areas further north into West Virginia and Maryland are getting pounded right now so we’ll see those snow totals certainly go up to even more impressive numbers. We’re ALL expecting to see more VERY COLD temps and more natural snow falling between now and through the Christmas day period and several forecasters are already talking of another snow event the weekend AFTER Christmas.
If you haven’t yet made those reservations to play in the snow at your favorite ski resort then what the ever-loving-heck are you waiting for! CALL TODAY or you’re going to miss out on one of the sweetest Christmas ski weeks/weekends in a while!
TRAFFIC ARE US!!!
It’s funny but around mid morning on Friday, we noticed that all of our 16 office computers began to grind to a slow crawl on the net. We have a 10/2 broadband connection for our surfing needs (we host the website offsite on a pipeline that is among the fastest in the country) but we were seeing no surfing speed at all. We called and complained only to find out that the streaming webcam feeds that we were serving within our office server was eating all of our upload allowance per second. We killed the video server and immediately went back to business as usual!
We knew right then that we were getting bombed with traffic and Urchin stats confirmed that this morning. Our ski and webcam network served up ONE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND page views on Friday! That is 1,568,419 pages that worked viewed on Friday alone! We saw 88,104 unique visitors on Friday alone and you guys stuck around and looked at an average of nearly 18 pages of the website each!
That is nearly unheard of on the internet, unless you’re talking porn. Obviously WE were talking POWDER and you guys really wanted to see it. We had to tweak some of the webcam displays to handle the load but we’re already seeing some crazy traffic numbers this morning. With daylight revealing some incredible snowy views, we’re certain to break Friday’s mid December traffic record – today. We’re already seeing nearly a third of yesterday’s traffic number and it’s only 10am!
MAKING MOVES TO HANDLE THE GROWTH!
We’ve seen some 100,000+ visitor totals during mid January snows before but we had not experienced an 88,000+ visitor day in mid December before! With the obvious enthusiastic support of our new webcam technology where we are showing more live views than ever, and with the RECORD advertising support that we’ve had this season, we have installed a new super server with dual processors and mega memory/speed etc to handle the growth that we’re expecting as we move into the Christmas to January period. This new system is also allowing us 10 terabytes of bandwidth (traffic transfer) and with that we will be moving all of the LIVE Webcam feeds to that server which should take many of the faster, broadband cameras to nearly television quality. We hope to start implementing those moves on Monday or Tuesday.
I can’t wait to see how that proves out. Visit the great cameras at www.HighCountryWebCams.com (it may be a little glitchy today with all the traffic but the views are worth it!)
Here’s a full tour for your Saturday viewing pleasure!
Wisp Resort – 19° – 4" of new snow! They are open today with awesome conditions on 14 trails open, terrain park, their mountain coaster AND snow tubing. It will be an awesome day at Wisp!
Snowshoe Mountain – 20° – 17" of snow! The snow storm has already dumped 17" of The Shoe and it is STILL coming down hard as of this morning! They will offer POWDER conditions on 31 trails today as well as tubing, snowmobiling, horse drawn sleigh rides and terrain parks all operating – as well as night skiing tonight on 12 trails on the Silvercreek side of the mountain! Snowshoe will not be making snow on OPEN terrain today and they are making snow on Cupp Run to attempt to get it open prior to Christmas!
Joanna at Snowshoe reported that road crews continue to really stay on top of the road and parking areas to keep things clear even as snow is falling, but with all this snow, caution is advised if you’re driving in. My buddy, Laura had the morning off, but we’ll hope to show you guys some video and photos from up there later in the weekend! By the way, that is 38" of snow thus far on the season for Snowshoe as of 7am this morning!
Canaan Valley’s Weather guru, David Lesher is reporting an official snow measurement of 10.9" of snow thus far in the last 24 hours up there. That is 37.2" on the season and it is 15° at his 3715 ft elevations atop Canaan Mountain in Davis, West Virginia!
Canaan Valley Resort & Conference Center – 20° – They are reporting 16" of snow and it is snowing heavily as of this early Saturday report. They’ve added a couple of trails to offer 6 trails today for day skiing and snowboarding only today. Expecting to open Upper Canaan Curve and the Chute by Monday. Tube Park to open before Christmas.
David Vance emailed me, "It is here. Snow, Snow, and more snow. What a Beautiful sight. Don’t be the last to hit all the fresh powder. 16" inches of new snow and still coming down.:-)
You think he’s excited!
Timberline Resort – 20° – They too received 16" of snow and they will operate with Powder conditions for day skiing and snowboarding on Saturday with 4 trails available. They will open for night skiing on December 26th and more trails will open within a day or so. Several reporting services are reporting that Timberline is not open yet. They are inaccurate. Timber is open!
Winterplace Resort – 28° – 17" of snow! They will operate with NO snowmaking today and 15 of their 28 trails available! They do not yet have tubing or terrain parks open. They DO have sweet POWDER and great conditions! One of the black diamonds, "Drop Off" is open as well!
Massanutten Resort – 23° – 14" of snow! They are open for DAY and NIGHT sessions on Saturday with 9 of 14 trails and 6 lanes of tubing available. They made snow as well and conditions could not be better for today at Mass! terrain parks are open as well!
Wintergreen Resort – 14° – Anne Marie Jones is reporting 24" of snow so far as of 7:38AM and it is still snowing! It sounds like Wintergreen might have been in the direct path of the bulk of the snow storm as Anne Marie posted, "Today is likely to be a very slow start for us as we dig out and try to operate through blizzard conditions. Roads throughout the state remain in poor condition, many leading to the resort are impassable with 4 wheel drive vehicles. Please reconsider attempting to travel here today, conditions will be much better tomorrow. We are making lots of snow in an effort to get as much terrain open as quickly as we can. Tequila and Sunrise should open today and Upper Cliffhanger and Lower Wild Turkey should open Monday. All of this natural snow and the cold temperatures forecasted for the next 10 days will allow us to get slopes open in record time. This could very well be the best Christmas ever! Keep checking this report for all of the details.
Skiing and Riding: Today we have 9 slopes and trails open and 3 lifts. We will be open for both day and night sessions. The average snow base depth throughout the resort is 24”-36”. SUPER SAVER RATES ARE IN EFFECT THIS WEEKEND – adult 4hr -$37, adult 8hr -$46, youth 4hr -$28, youth 8hr -$36 (4 hour tickets are not available on Saturdays, or during holiday periods)"
It isn’t OFTEN that marketing people advise not travelling to their resort. That, my friends, takes class!
Bryce Resort – 25° – 10" of snow! They are 100% open for day sessions today! They have tubing operating as well and it is great to see nearly a foot of snow fall on this cool Virginia ski area! They are not open for night sessions just yet.
The Homestead – 25° – Reported 2.5" as of 4pm Friday. One person at the resort reported 20" of snow but we could not confirm that and Matt Fussell wasn’t available for us. Yet another person there reported that they don’t have word yet if they were even going to be open. We’d suggest calling ahead.
Ober Gatlinburg – 31° – 8 to 10" of snow! Ober was due for this kind of snow and conditions will be awesome there today! They have 5 trails and tubing open.
Appalachian Ski Mountain – 24° – 16" of snow! Talked with GM Brad Moretz this morning and he said, "I don’t think we’ve ever had a snow forecast if 1-2 feet in one night here and we made a ton of snow all night. We’ve added 16" to our base in the last 24 hours and we’re 100% for today and deep!"
Brad told me that they would drop Hard Core, Thin Slice and Appaltop back to closed probably Sunday to focus snowmaking to build deep bases on those and reopen them on Wednesday to go 100% open again! He also shared that they were DONE making snow during the day now so go enjoy the powder and NO snowmaking!
Brad also said that they salted and worked the roads all night so they probably have the best roads into the ski area in the county.
Beech Mountain Resort – 20° – 14" of snow! As promised Beech is now open with 9 of 15 trails that now includes Upper and Lower Robbin’s Run. Gil Adams has said on Friday that Beech would have that open today and they do! Powder Bowl is also open for the first time this season as is Crossway and conditions could not be much sweeter than they will be today!
Cataloochee Ski Area – 25° – 12" of snow as of 6pm Friday night! They are 100% open and have the terrain park and tubing open as well. Powder!
Sugar Mountain Resort – 20° – 14" of snow! They had not updated their website as of 7:45am so we called up there and spoke with Michelle who told us that the updated ski report shows 15 trails open for today. A couple of our staffers told us that Tom Terrific is open so you adrenalyn junkies should enjoy that sweet trail with powder today. Call ahead for ice skating and tubing.
Wolf Ridge Resort – 28° – 10" of snow! They look to be open with 5 trails today and Rick Bussey mentioned that they will open more terrain pretty fast now! There’s some conflicting trail data from their website frontpage which lists 5 trails open, to the snow report page saying 6 trails to their actual trail listings only display 4 open. We’ll go with 5 trails and build from there. They posted, "What a great introduction to the Christmas Holiday break with between 8 to 12 inches of snow. Its Saturday morning and with more snow in the forcast we are expecting a great day at the Wolf. We presently have six runs open and will continue to open more as the weather allows. Come out early and be the first to enjoy the fresh powder. See you on the Slopes !!!"
Sapphire Valley Ski – 5" of snow. They were talking about opening but didn’t get much snow made lately so they are probably going to wait and open on Monday to be in great shape for the Christmas skiers and snowboarders coming in this week. The Frozen Falls Tubing park COULD open today but they say to call ahead.
You can check the snow reports for all of the ski resorts of West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee and North Carolina via https://www.skisoutheast.com/skireports.php as well as videos, photos and more.
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Sug 29bech 19/12/19