Teton Powder Maker
December 22nd, 2008Posted in Skiing in the Tetons
Mother Nature is giving the gift of more Christmas powder to the Tetons this morning. Grand Targhee is reporting 8″ in the last 24 hours with 4″ of that having fallen after the lifts closed yesterday and Jackson is reporting 10″-11″ inches of new snow in the past 24 hours.
Just for fun, since these Pacific storms often cover a wide area, I checked the snow reports of Bridger Bowl to our north in Montana and Alta down in Utah and found neither had any appreciable new snow. Well folks, if you live in those snow deprived areas, come on up to the Tetons where we are expecting another few inches today before this storm moves on through. This morning’s radar show lots of snow to our southwest and moving toward us (although it could slide by to our south, just grazing us), so we’re bound to get some more to top off last night’s accumulation.
Basic Geography 101 teaches about the joys of orographic precipitation to irrigators and skiers, where tall mountain ranges force warm moisture laden air up to cooler elevations where the moisture condenses and falls out of the clouds as either rain or snow. Local Teton mythology has it that Grand Targhee benefits more than the Jackson Hole Resort from this weather phenomenon, but I beg to differ. So many winter storms are accompanied by southwestern winds that Targhee’s advantage of being on the western slope of the Tetons is mitigated. Often Jackson picks up more snow (as it has so far in today’s storm) due to wind direction.
Another factor that might explain why Jackson often gets more snow is that the Tetons are such a narrow range. The Jackson resort’s slopes are only a couple of miles further east then Targhee’s slopes so, depending on at what elevation the winds are the strongest, by the time the snow the Tetons’s forced out of the rising and cooling Pacific air reaches the ground, it may well have traveled those extra couple of miles and fell on Jackson in greater quantities than Targhee picked up. Another SNOTEL recording station a couple of miles east of Targhee at the same elevation as Jackson’s might reveal some interesting truths about the Teton Mountain’s preecipitation patterns.
The skier’s bottomline: Only Utah’s Wasatch Mountains offer equal powder skiing opportunities, but down there, you really have to be an early bird to get the powder before Salt Lake’s huge skier population decimates it. With the crash in the Teton real estate boom, The Teton powder stash looks safe for quiet a few more years.
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