Snow on the peaks!

Showers and storms persisted through Wednesday afternoon and continued through about midnight on Wednesday night. Because these showers fell at night when the temperatures were a few degrees cooler, the snow level decreased to 10,000-11,000 feet.

Lots of ski areas are posting snowy photos this morning.

Here is one image from Jeff Lennox, looking toward Breckenridge and the Ten Mile Range:

Forecast

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday should be mostly dry for most mountains. Get out and enjoy the golden leaves of the Aspen trees - many groves have started to turn and will likely peak in about 10 days (ish).

Next Tuesday and Wednesday, moisture from a hurricane / tropical storm will likely push into Colorado from the southwest. Both the GFS and European models agree on this, so my confidence is medium to high about this five-day forecast. Expect clouds and rain (snow above maybe 11,000-12,000 feet) next Tuesday and Wednesday.

New app - Open Summit Hiking Forecasts!

I have been dreaming of building a weather forecasting app for hikers for years, and we finally had the time and funds to start the effort at the beginning of this summer.

After months of work, the app is finally live!

The app provides hourly forecasts for each 14,000 foot peak in Colorado, including the chance of lightning, precipitation, summit temperature, and summit wind speed.

Also, and I find this super cool, the app shows recent Instagram pictures taken near each mountain. You can quickly see the trail conditions (is there snow?) by looking at these recent pictures.

This is version one of the app, and for now it is exclusively available as an app for iPhone. If you have an iPhone, and you like to hike 14ers, I would be thankful if you would download the app, play with it, and leave a (hopefully positive) review and send us lots of feedback to [email protected].

We have big plans for OpenSummit, and your feedback at this very early stage will be incredibly helpful. While we will be focusing most of our time on OpenSnow during the winter, we will take your feedback, improve OpenSummit over the next 6 months, and hope to have even more features ready for next spring.

Download the app here: http://opsw.co/OpenSummitapp

And now a plus for OpenSnow All Access

If you’re looking for a way to support OpenSnow and get useful additional insight this winter, consider signing up for the All-Access Pass.

This pass gives you access to:

• 10-day forecasts

• Custom alerts to know about upcoming powder days

• Time-lapse webcams for tracking exactly when fresh snow has fallen

• Email delivery of the Colorado Daily Snow as soon as it’s published

All of this costs just $19 for one full year (365 days) and helps to support OpenSnow so that we can spend money and time to further improve our website and mobile apps.

I’d love to count you as an All-Access member!

Thanks for reading!

JOEL GRATZ