Heavy Snow Across North America, Warm, In The Alps
Heavy Snow Across North America, Warm, In The Alps
Published : 02-Mar-2012 01:21
There's probably not a huge chance that we'll see a repeat of last year's July 4th opening of around 10 California resorts following their record breaking winter 2010-11, but the good news is that Western USA has received its biggest snowfalls this season over the past week.
Some may be lamenting that the season is more than three months over while many resorts will be closing in a month's time – as they often do even before Easter week in many cases.
That's probably not the case now for Squaw Valley however, which promotes itself as 'North America's Spring Skiing Capital' and has been blessed by a four foot/1.2m snowfall in recent days.
"Snow has been consistently falling since Monday morning, and both Squaw and Alpine Meadows have been averaging a foot of snow each day. Beautiful weather is now in the forecast for Friday through Sunday for great driving conditions and even better skiing and riding this weekend,"said Squaw's Amelia Richmond.
Most other Californian resorts have also had big falls – Mammoth reported a foot (30cm) in the past 24 hours and Kirkwood went better still with 58cm (less than an inch under two feet).
Further East there have been similar falls in Utah at The Canyons and Snowbird and Jackson hole has continued what for it (up in Wyoming, compared to Colorado and Utah), have been a generally very good snow season all winter, with more huge falls of powder snow, which have also ignored manmade geographic boundaries and covered BC, Canada too.
Very far east indeed in the USA, but about closest west from here, New England big snowfalls last week have amounted to up to 1.2m accumulations at resorts like Stowe.
It's all change in the alps where temperatures have moved from 20 below at the start of February to up to +10 now, but most resorts are 'OK' due the snow built up over December and January. It's also supposed to turn colder over the next week.
Not so Scotland however – all five centres north of the border are now closed for the season unless a substantial new snow fall arrives after what may turn out to be the warmest ever February there.
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