Powder Alert

It’s been a long wait, but the present and presence of powder came on Christmas morning. Snow fell down to 2,000 feet and most ski areas around the state had several inches of Christmas powder.

There’s a second storm that is arriving over the weekend, and for the first time this season, there won’t be much of a rise in snow levels in between storms. As the system passes through Saturday night, the snow level should drop back down to 2,500 feet Sunday. Northern Oregon will receive 6-12 inches of snow and the central and southern parts of the state will get another 4-8 inches from this one. Sunday will likely be the best ski day of the season so far at most of Oregon’s ski areas.

After the weekend storm, clear and dry, but still cold!, weather sets in for about a week. So our newly gotten gains will remain.

We didn’t lose much snowpack last week as the snow level didn’t climb as high as originally expected, and snow fell at the beginning of the warm storm.

Looking ahead into 2015, the dry weather will continue into the first weekend of the New Year, and after a brief warm up with rising snow levels for a few days after that, it looks like colder conditions will set back in with new snow for the second weekend of 2015.

This isn’t a perfect powder pattern for Oregon, but it’s going in the right direction, and I don’t think the January mid-week warm-up will hurt the snowpack much.

Happy Holidays, and may all our dreams of powder come true for the New Year.

Matt Zaffino