Today, Ty and I headed up to Bolton Valley together for some turns, and since the resort has been offering lift-served skiing off Wilderness now, we decided to do some touring down at Timberline. With Timberline’s lower elevations, the snowpack wasn’t really reading for touring earlier in the season, but with day after day of snow since Thanksgiving, the snowpack depths just continue to climb at all elevations. The mountain snowpack is taking off, and the depth at the Mt. Mansfield stake is pushing 40 inches,. At our house at 500’ in the Winooski Valley, the snowpack has already hit 14 inches, so we knew Timberline at 1,500’+ was more than ready to support some quality ski touring.
Indeed, Timberline was ready for prime time – at least in terms of overall snowpack depth if not yet its subsurface base depths or the density gradient of the snowpack. Down around 1,500’ at the Timberline Base, the snowpack depth was 20 inches, so that was plenty of snow for skiing. But unlike much of the snowpack up at the main mountain, there wasn’t really any settled base below that snow. So, there was a bit less flexibility in terrain choice, assuming you wanted to ski reasonably safely or didn’t want to risk damaging equipment. However, there’s more than enough coverage for the mowed/maintained trails. The only other issue with the snowpack was that the powder was of roughly equal density throughout its depth. It certainly wasn’t upside down, but without a density increase in the deeper layers, skis are prone to sinking quite far, and you can get bogged down or experience tip submersions. We’d both brought 115 mm fat skis, so that really helped to mitigate that issue in terms of overall floatation and the ability to have fun on any lower-angle terrain, but it’s something to consider right now when you’re choosing which equipment to use for an outing. We saw some folks out on snow surfers, and I bet these were fun with decent floatation as long as they were on slope of sufficient pitch.
We got out in the morning because we knew that there was the chance for temperatures to go above freezing later in the day, but if temperatures did go above 32 F, it seemed to be just marginally. I’ve mentioned in some of my recent reports that we’ve needed a consolidation event for the snowpack in certain areas, so in that respect the warmer storm that is expected to come into the area this week is helpful, but getting an inch of liquid as dense snow would of course be superior to getting it as rain. I can’t say if the storm will be a net gain for liquid in the snowpack down at our site in the valley yet, but it should be an increase in the snow water equivalent in the mountain snowpack.
