It's April and Still Snowing!

In the winter of 2009-10, things didn't really get going until March. Yet as soon as April hit, it was on. Now this year, in 2011, the snow started flying early (as is accustomed in the year of a La Nina event) but began to falter around Christmas. January would ultimately be one of the warmest and wettest ever recorded for that month.

After receiving more than 20" of rain in January, with a mean temperature of 35 degrees & average freezing levels hovering between 500' and 1000' above Pass level, moral was low and mutiny was looking imminent. Several winter weather events were forecast by the National Weather Service in early February, but none came to fruition, Most of the precipitation would eventually fall as rain as freezing-levels rose ever higher. Valentines Day came and went; things were looking bleak.

Then, as if a switch had been turned, the temperature began to plummet, and thanks to the setup of a Puget Sound Convergence Zone (A weather phenomena known to impact this part of the Cascades with large amounts of precipitation) caused a modest weather system to stall over the area, allowing a front which had been forecast to deliver just 3"-5" of snow to dump nearly 30" in a 24 hour window. It was pandemonium, after such a long hiatus from winter, the on-hill staff: Ski Patrol, Lift Operations Grooming, Etc, were slammed. As staff raced to get back into "hard-work mode," rabid powder-hounds arrived in the parking-lots. The masses had arrived!

The general mood had become that the La Nina forecast for the winter of 2010-11 had been false, and as such was the aire, it was every man, woman and child for themselves. It was mayhem out there. Everyone thought that this was a fluke event, and that it would return to the warm and wet pattern that had been prevalent for the past six weeks. But it kept snowing. It snowed for days. For a week. For two weeks! The masses gradually got there fix of "Cascade Crude," and moved on to whatever off-hill hobby could persist in the coldest, wettest Spring that Washington has experienced in the last 50 years.

However, not everybody left...

It's now nearly May, the lifts have stopped spinning, but not everybody has gone home. There are still bands of local hellions roaming these hills, reveling in the fact that it is still snowing, and they are still here.

EVIDENCE


Below: Peder Lovold, a young grasshopper of these hills, strokes his fine-tipped pen against natures canvas. And gets waist deep in it.


Two: Rider Nathan Cheyne pops a big ollie into the late April freshies.


Three: Two-planker DJ McCracken does this sequence justice by riding away silently in the deep, fresh snow.