Alta, UT 12/22/10

[Admin]

Day 21: Heavy!

Alta picked up another half foot or more of uber-dense 10-15% snowfall Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. I met Skidog for a few runs first thing, but after a day earlier it was a huge disappointment. This stuff fell atop the lighter snow that fell earlier in the week and frankly, the upside-down layer cake it created was really working me. If you submarined below the heavier stuff in a drift it brought you to a dead stop, as it did to me several times. Tough going.

Tough going for ASP, too, for the mountain opened nearly 45 minutes late thanks to control work that kept producing slides after the scheduled opening bell. We stood in line with Jamey Parks and an ER doc from NYC who was giving serious consideration to saying to hell with everything and packing up his family and moving to SLC. It's contagious.

 

[Marc_C]

... and an ER doc from NYC who was giving serious consideration to saying to hell with everything and packing up his family and moving to SLC. It's contagious.

What? He'd leave the awesome skiing at Hunter?

 

[EMSC]

Alta picked up another half foot or more of uber-dense 10-15% snowfall Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Over this way a bit, word from the Aspen area is that it rained up to ~9,000 foot level much of the storm.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Adam heard that same Aspen comment from someone on another Forum. That someone was complaining about how hard it was to ski that snow but got little sympathy from Adam.

Monday: yet again low and very thick clouds with no visibility and staying very warm with the low just barely under freezing. Heavy snowfall overnight and one of the densest on record with over 2" off water in only 13" of snow, so the top layer of snow came it at about 15% water while the early stages of this storm were around 4%. Light to moderate snow in the morning becoming heavy mid day as temperature is stuck around freezing. This was the most water content in any one day in all the years of record keeping- 3.19" of water in 24 hours (but with only 25"- 64 cm- of new snow). Snowpack also at a record depth for this date.

RMBL is located between Aspen and Crested Butte and received 82.5 inches of snow (7.14 inches SWE) from Dec. 18-21. The italicized sentence is the one that caught my attention. The record water day at Gothic had 12.8% water content. Mammoth's long term average is 12.9%