Both snow stakes at mid-mountain and the top of Blue Sky show 2-3 inches of new snow, most of which fell on Thursday night. While there is still very little terrain open (3 runs), this natural snow should create soft turns on Friday morning. And as a bonus, temperatures are about 10-15 degrees warmer on Friday morning compared to Thursday morning as readings are now in the mid-teens.

Looking at the webcams, the mountain appears ready to open a lot of terrain since everything is covered in a coat of snow. But this is a tease as the base is still very thin. I have no insider information on terrain openings, but my guess is that there will not be much additional terrain that does open in the next week since the weather outlook is for sunny and dry weather through at least Saturday, December 16th with high temperatures in the 30s and low temperatures that dip into the 20s (which should allow for some snowmaking at night).

The next potential storm will arrive on or around December 17th. Between the 17th and the end of December, the storm track should move closer to Vail and we might see a great end of the month (in terms of natural snow), but there's also a chance that the storm track will stay just a hair to our north and only tease us with a bit of snow now and again. Obviously, I am hoping for the storm track to dive south and bring storm after storm to Vail, but it's too early to know what will happen 10-20 days from now. Stay tuned for daily updates!

JOEL GRATZ