Maybe the calendar says its Spring, but Mother Nature is back in winter mode this morning. Decent snow fell across the Tetons last night with Grand Targhee scoring the biggest hit with 12″-13″ being reported this morning. Over on the east side of the range Jackson is reporting half a foot.
It appears this dose of [...]

After last night’s National Weather Service’s prediction of lots of snow turned into rain here in the Tetons, I thought, what the heck, why not get further depressed and look at NASA’s global temperature map for February 2009.
As you can see, only Western Canada and Siberia were below normal while much of the Arctic and [...]

On waking up this Monday morning, not to the 8-12 inches of new snow the National Weather Services folks optimmistically predicted for the Tetons, but to a mere 2″ at Grand Targhee  and 3″ on Jackson’s upper mountain, one wonders about the difficulties of  weather prediction in the mountains, or the variance between weekend weather [...]

This morning’s snow reports are encouraging: Jackson says they picked up 3″-5″ of snow after closing yesterday making for 6″-10″ in the past 24 hours. Grand Targhee is reporting 3″ since the lifts closed and 8″ in the past 24 hours. Further north of here, even snow starved Big Sky and Bridger have picked up [...]

Rain. I hear it drumming LOUDLY on my roof. On March 3rd, we should be getting wonderful light snow. I just checked Targhee’s SNOTEL metering and see that even at 9260′ in the mountains the temperatures have been above freezing for the past 30 hours. SNOTEL also shows a loss of 4.5″ of snow depth [...]

A fast moving weather system slammed into the Tetons yesterday afternoon dumping more than a half foot of snow- maybe more, but the high winds tossed the excess off to the Dakotas. Paying more attention to the total 24 hour accumulation figures of 7-8 inches posted on the Targhee and Jackson snow reports, than to [...]

Warm temps, soggy snow and robins chirping in the trees got you down since it is still February?
The upside is the early arrival of crust in the Teton Valley. Crust thick enough to support a skier on skate skis. It’s crust skiing time! Maybe not everywhere, but I cruised for several miles this morning and [...]

Now that W is on permanent vacation, I guess NASA’s climate scientists are no longer under house arrest, so we can mine some interesting (disturbing?) climate data on NASA’s website. If you thought we were having a real winter back in January, check out this NASA map of the average global temperatures for January 2009, [...]

Lou Dawson posted a little rant recently(midway in a longer post), “Industrial skiing is indeed a blemish on the face of public land and snowsports in general. Expensive, resource intensive junkshow, for the most part — though ANY skiing has its upside and we do ride the cable on occasion.”
Lou’s has an admitted bias of [...]

Here in the Rocky Mountains, we already know that researchers have found Global Warming is causing spring to arrive earlier and causing our winter snows to melt away sooner, draining our mountains of the snowpack  vital to keeping rivers and streams flowing through the summer months. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest [...]