Not a great year for skiing in northern New Mexico due to the dry weather and light snowfall. Continuing a trend of below average years, this season's snowpack came in below last season even though the snow arrived a month early for us. Pajarito Mountain never opened. The departure of Santa Fe Mountain Sports marks the second ski retailer to close up shop in the last
Below are some interesting year-over-year comparisons, from this season and last, of reported base depths at Ski Santa Fe, Taos, and Crested Butte, CO. They're sourced from onthesnow.com , my go-to snow/ski app for tracking ski conditions (which is not at all helpful in NM since the next ski season is nine long months away). The base totals in red for Santa Fe and Taos clearly show the large early accumulations in Nov/Dec then very meager additions for the rest of the season until late the final month. Colorado saw quite a bit more in the way of moisture and storms beginning in February that just didn't sweep south to our end of the Rockies. Last year most of the Colorado snowpack tracked fairly evenly with ours, an average base depth at the Butte of 40-50in (not an impressive amount).
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Lots of other cool snow stats to click through for recent years at the website, showing a highwater mark of 258in of total snowfall in calendar year 2010. Just 71in in 2007. Last year's snowfall, which mirrors this one, recorded 147in of total accumulations.
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Pajarito did sort of open for a couple weeks of bunnyhill action. It probably might could have opened for a couple weeks to a month top to bottom, but that christmas to end of feb dry spell was pretty deadly. But either way, it was an awful season with some serious consequences.
ReplyDeleteCorrection noted, bunnyhill was open. Much appreciated Tarik. I saw SWNSKI kind of had the nordic trails setup, or at least they had the sun fences setup. The Valles Caldera were mostly barren all winter. I miss winter already.
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