After four dismally dry winters, at long last El Nino is delivering the goods to the Sierra. This winter is shaping up to be a good one it's actually average compared to normal Sierra snowpack, but compared to recent years, it feels like a gluttonous outpouring of pow day, after pow day. Storms blow in off the Pacific Crest, dumping a couple feet here, a couple more feet there. The sun shines for a few days. And then another whopper blows in, coating our tracks in a smooth layer of frosty cream cheese. It's heaven.
Flylow ambassador Bevin Waite recently wrote up this snow report on conditions in Kirkwood, near South Lake Tahoe, skiing the resort and nearby backcountry.
"The nice thing about Kirkwood is that it can be days after a storm has rolled through and you can still find fresh tracks ... if you put a little bit of effort in," Bevin writes. "I warmed up on the main drag down Chair 6 and then promptly moved to the traverse from Sentinel bowl to the palisades. That s where the real fun started. Surprisingly, even though El Nino driven storms originate from the warmer central pacific, it had stayed cold (8 degrees when I arrived in the morning). This preserved the quality of the snow and made for fluffy rides through cut up pow in the early morning."
Check out the whole post at Snowbrains.com.