Should You Go Skiing?

While it appears to be legal to go skiing, my take on this is that it's probably best to not ski.

If you go skiing in the backcountry, please stay close to home, do not travel to mountain communities if you don't already live there, and put yourself in a low-risk situation so that you do not have an accident that requires search and rescue (here's an amazingly-good article about what happened near Telluride on March 24th)

If you go skiing at a closed resort, please check ahead to see if uphill access is open (spoiler alert – uphill access is NOT open at most resorts) and respect those resorts who have closed uphill access.

The Weather

Wednesday’s weather was more showery than I expected. I thought the day would be mostly dry, but the radar lit up during the midday and afternoon hours with high-elevation showers. I couldn’t find evidence of much accumulation, though. By the end of the day on Wednesday, most of the clouds began to dissipate and I tracked down this image from the southern mountains showing beautiful alpenglow as the sun set.

Now on Thursday morning, the radar animation over western Colorado is picking up the beginning of our next storm. Look closely and you’ll see that the color scale changes during the final frame of the animation. The National Weather Service office in Grand Junction can adjust the scale and sensitivity of the radar to attempt to better “see” light-to-moderate snowfall. This is what happened during the final frame and it allows the incoming snow to stand-out when viewing the animation.

The radar scans the sky pretty close to the ground, but there’s still nothing better than to look at mountain cams to see what’s actually happening on the ground. And these cams show that it is snowing over the northern mountains.

Over the far northern mountain passes, snow is accumulating on the roads, though these snowy roads will likely turn wet as the day goes on thanks to the incoming solar radiation pushing through the clouds from the high April sun angle.

A bit farther south, there is a “fuzziness” to the air near I-70 which means that light snow is falling.

From Thursday morning through Saturday morning these showers will continue to focus on the northern mountains with some snow also hitting the central mountains and the northern San Juan mountains. The latest models have not changed the forecast precipitation much and we are still expecting 4-8 inches over the northern mountains.

The image below shows the average forecast precipitation from 46 models and the blue areas roughly correspond to 4-8 inches of snow.

For another data source, let’s look at the University of Utah multi-model forecast for the northern mountains, which shows 1-7 inches with the most models concentrated between about 3-6 inches.

With most models showing total accumulations just below or around a half-a-foot, we might not see that much settled new snow on the ground due to the high sun angle that will create some melting during the day. Snow levels could be as high as 9,000+ feet during the day and could drop to about 7,000 feet at night and during the first few hours of the morning.

Saturday will be a transition day with a few showers hanging around the northern and central mountains but the storm will be moving away.

By Sunday most of the day should be sunny and dry through a few more showers could hang around the northern mountains.

Then starting on Monday, warm and mostly dry springtime will arrive and it’ll hang around for at least a week or two. This forecast map for next week is pretty darn clear cut!

We will close out April and begin May with mountain temperatures in the 40s and 50s and a significant period of snowmelt.

As the snow accumulation season winds down, and the hiking/biking season starts up, be sure to check our other service at OpenSummit.com and the OpenSummit App for iOS and Android for hourly forecasts for hundreds (soon to be thousands) of peaks and trails around Colorado and the United States. OpenSummit clearly shows lightning risk, temperatures, winds, precipitation, and cloud cover at the elevation of the trails. Also, in a few weeks, we will add new features that will be especially cool - more on that soon.

Stay healthy, stay happy.

My next post will be on Friday morning.

JOEL GRATZ

Geography Key

Northern Mountains
Steamboat, Granby, Beaver Creek, Vail, Ski Cooper, Copper, Breckenridge, Keystone, Loveland, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Berthoud Pass, Eldora, Rocky Mountain National Park, Cameron Pass

Along the Divide
Loveland, Arapahoe Basin, Winter Park, Berthoud Pass

East of the Divide
Eldora, Echo, Rocky Mountain National Park, Cameron Pass

Central Mountains
Aspen, Sunlight, Monarch, Crested Butte, Irwin, Powderhorn

Southern Mountains
Telluride, Silverton – north side of the southern mountains | Purgatory, Wolf Creek – south side of the southern mountains