Hell freezing over?
After the terrible ski year last year, we’re now at the extreme opposite end of the scale and areas are closing because of too much snow! Mt. Baker had this posted on their site:
Well, the rain event we were looking for to help settle out the tremendous snowpack we have received recently did happen last night. We received nearly 9 feet of new snow in just a few days in the past week and we have closed the ski area to allow all this new snow to settle out a bit.
We will spend today getting the ski area ready to operate and WE WILL BE REOPENING TOMORROW, WEDNESDAY JANUARY 18TH at 9:00am and we expect to open in normal midweek operation.
Please take a minute to review the Tree Well and Deep Snow Safety information posted here on our website. You can link to it directly from the homepage at www.mtbaker.us.
Apparently, there have been two inbounds deaths in tree wells and moats along with inbounds avies last week.
Aaron and I made it over to Snoqualmie yesterday for the holiday. We started at alpental and after lunch headed over to Hyak to find out what was going on there. In two hours at Alpental, it snowed about 3″ on the car. We had great powder (and not too heavy) during every run. Broke a pole on the third run and then realized how much I rely on them.
At Hyak (Summit East), there were about 2 dozen skiers on the hill and we found untracked snow all over the place. It was quite a bit wetter there, but it still snowed the entire time.
On the way back, we realized why there were no lift lines. The pass had been closed since the late morning and there were about 10 miles of cars waiting to go east over the pass.
I’ve also been getting an email almost every day from Whistler saying they’ve received 6-14″ of snow over the last 24 hours. It’s going to be sick when we get there in a couple of weeks.