First Round of October 2022 Snow for Vermont’s Green Mountains

Since our first snows of the season back in September, we’ve moved on into a new month and another window for early season snowfall.  This time the snow chances are associated with a series of small disturbances that started moving into the area last night and are expected to continue through the weekend.

The first notifications I saw of accumulation appeared this morning in the Northern New England Cold Season thread on the American Weather Forums – Powderfreak indicated that it was snowing all the way down to 1,500’ at the base of Stowe Mountain Resort, and flakes were even spotted as low as 1,000’ around The Matterhorn.  Powderfreak posted some images from both the top and bottom of the Stowe Gondola that showed the fresh snow.  As the snow and clouds pulled away a bit more by midday, he posted a beautiful snowliage image of some of Mount Mansfield’s slopes.

The temperatures stayed cold enough throughout the day that new snow continued to hang around on the ground, with the snow line rising to around 2,400’ in the midafternoon period.  Powderfreak sent along some additional nice views from his afternoon hike on the slopes of Mansfield, and he commented on how it was nice to be back out with the crunch of snow underfoot.

Bolton Valley, VT 21DEC2019

An image of Dylan skiing in the Wilderness area at Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont in mid-December after a couple of small snowfalls
Dylan catching some turns today on the natural snow over at Wilderness

We’ve had just a couple of modest systems bringing fresh snow this week, Winter Storm Finley on Tuesday/Wednesday, and then an arctic front with snow squalls soon after that.  In combination they brought 6 to 7 inches of snow down here at the house, and close to a foot up at Bolton Valley.  We had some warm storms last week that firmed up the slopes, but a photo of Powderfreak’s from Wednesday showed some gorgeous powder skiing thanks to the new snow.

“Lower Turnpike has a nice skier packed base with 4 to 6 inches of medium weight powder on it, and the areas of untracked snow offered fantastic turns.”

Although Ty was at work today, E and Dylan and I decided to head up to Bolton Valley to check out the new accumulations and overall conditions.  Temperatures have been quite chilly over the past couple of days, with highs only around 10 F or so, but today they were getting nicely up into the 20s F in the afternoon.

Lift-served trail options are fairly limited right now since natural snow trails off Vista don’t have nearly enough snow to support those levels of skier traffic, but we rode the Vista Quad and eventually made our way over to Wilderness to see what the terrain over there offered  With mostly skinning traffic on that part of the mountain, many areas on the lower slopes of Wilderness are in great shape.  Lower Turnpike has a nice skier packed base with 4 to 6 inches of medium weight powder on it, and the areas of untracked snow offered fantastic turns.  We only saw three folks skinning up during the course of our descent, so skier traffic seemed light, in line with the conditions we found.

An image of Erica Telemark skiing in the Wilderness area of Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Erica masquerading as Ty by borrowing his ski clothes for today’s outing.

Pizzas set up at Fireside Flatbread at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in VermontWe stopped in for some slices at Fireside Flatbread before leaving, and there was modest midafternoon crowd enjoying the atmosphere.  The pizza was fantastic as always!

The forecast actually looks fairly benign over the course of the next week, but the weather models due hint at a couple of possibilities for snow.  We’ll be watching to see if anything develops.

Bolton Valley, VT 10MAR2018

An image of E and Dylan in the car at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in Vermont
An image of Ty skiing powder in the Villager Trees area of Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Snowfall over the past few days has built up some great powder at Bolton Valley, and today was a day for getting out and finding it!

Although Bolton Valley was only reporting an inch of new snow in this morning’s report, they’ve picked up more than a foot of snow in the past couple of days from Winter Storm Quinn.  Combined with modest midweek skier traffic, that was already a recipe for some great skiing today, but even more snow was expected to arrive as the day wore on to further freshen up the slopes.

E and Dylan had some obligations in the morning, but Ty and I were free to ski and had plans to meet up with Stephen at the resort.  We parked at Timberline, alerted Stephen with a text, and headed up the Timberline Quad for a run.  Although I couldn’t find any slopes that hadn’t been thoroughly resurfaced at the resort during yesterday’s outing, I can finally say that I found at least one today.  I figured we could try a run on Lost Girlz, which would be a really tough test of the resurfacing.  Unfortunately, the combination of dense evergreen canopy above, and very steep pitch were too much; the coverage just wasn’t enough.  So, we high tailed it over to Tattle Tale for a run.  The snow was certainly good there, but in general it had seen much more traffic than usual because the Tattle Tale headwall was open.

An image of Ty skiing in the Villager Trees area of Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Fun in the Villager Trees

We met up with Stephen and did a full run of Tattle Tale so that we could really take in the headwall experience.  It was a bit windblown at the very top, but coverage was quite good overall and it was definitely worth the trip. 

An image of Stephen skiing in the Villager Trees area of Bolton Valley Resort in Vermont
Stephen getting just what he was looking for today… powder for his fat skis!

The rest of the morning was dedicated to getting Stephen some deep untracked powder, and that we delivered in spades with trips to The Crack, Villager Trees, and White Rabbit.  Stephen seemed quite happy floating around on his fat alpine touring skis.  The powder was easily a foot or more in untracked areas, and it was definitely delivering great turns with that right-side-up density gradient that Winter Storm Quinn had set up.  In addition, new snowfall was ramping right up as we approached midday due to an incoming mountain upslope snow event that’s developing in the area.

An image of a water bottle and some ski gloves at the Fireside Flatbread bar at Bolton Valley Ski Resort in VermontThe three of us headed to Fireside Flatbread for some lunch, and E and Dylan joined us for a bite once they arrived at the resort.  We all did a Cobrass/Five Corners run together before Stephen had to head back to pick up Johannes, and the rest of us finished off the day with some Timberline runs.  E and Dylan had skied Spell Binder earlier and it got a great recommendation.  It lived up to the expectations, especially that skier’s left that Dylan enjoyed ripping up so much.

“As mentioned earlier, the big weather news in the coming days is the mountain upslope snow event that’s poised to bring another hefty shot of snow to the area.”

As mentioned earlier, the big weather news in the coming days is the mountain upslope snow event that’s poised to bring another hefty shot of snow to the area.  There’s a vertically stacked low pressure sitting in Northern Maine, and that’s typically a great setup for snowfall in the Northern Greens when the low pressure wraps in deep moisture from the Atlantic.  You know there’s some potential for continued snowfall when the National Weather Service in Burlington speaks about difficulty in finding the off switch for the snowfall in their forecast discussion:

“Another good problem to have is trying to find the off switch to the upslope snow machine…looks like a brief break develops Sunday afternoon into Monday…before more accumulating snowfall for Tuesday into Weds.”

First October snow for the Green Mountains of Vermont

An image of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont with a bit of October snow atop the Chin
Today you can still see a bit of snow atop Mt. Mansfield above 3,500′ or so.

It hasn’t been an especially cool fall thus far in Vermont, and in fact we had some rather warm days with temperatures up to 90 degrees F for the Champlain Valley last month.  It’s hard to think of potential snow with temperatures like that!  Due to the heat, we actually delayed our September apple picking trip to Boyer’s Orchard with the Bennetts and the Burseys for one week to wait for a more autumnal feel.  The temperatures and generally fair weather have certainly made for some fantastic outdoor activities, but the warmth may have altered the timeline for the development of the fall foliage color.  In any event, by the beginning of last week I could already see that we were past peak color in the Winooski Valley.  Bare trees were numerous throughout the hillsides, leaving at least small gaps in the colorful views.

It’s funny, but despite the warm weather in recent weeks, we actually had some September snowfall on Mt. Mansfield and other peaks in the region.  We don’t get September snow every year, so it’s quite interesting that things came together to put some white on the peaks so early during a warm period.

With the fall foliage around and especially with the colors now beginning to wind down, more snow usually isn’t far behind, and indeed today’s dramatic drop in temperatures from the 70s F we had just yesterday evening made it really feel like we were transitioning further into fall.  We never got out of the 40s F in the valleys, so there was definitely a bit of a bite out there with wind on top of those temperatures.  While heading to a class today here on the UVM campus, it absolutely felt like one of those days where it could easily be snowing along the spine.  And, lo and behold, when I later checked in on the Northern New England fall thread on the American Weather Forums, Powderfreak was already reporting accumulating snow down to 2,700’ on Mt. Mansfield.  He posted some additional pictures later, showing how the snow had a hard time accumulating on the warm ground in most areas and was typically found on the trees.  He did report snowfall down as low as 1,500’ in elevation though, probably via help from the orographics of the Green Mountain Spine.  The Bolton Valley Facebook page also posted an image of flakes getting down to the Village, and I’m sure many of the local mountains saw flakes as well.

I hear Killington also took advantage of the cooler temperatures to test the snow guns, so we’re certainly on our way.  The longer range forecasts suggest a possible stretch of colder weather near the end of the month into November, so we’ll see what potential that brings with regard to manmade or natural snow.