The Worst Four Letter Word

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 in the same time frame.

I recently posted about how warm January was worldwide. Last night I tried checking in with NASA’s data to see how February went, but they hadn’t tabulated their data for that recent a month yet. Maybe I don’t really want to know….

I’d rather remember last year’s good times. Here’s an extract from a  post on 3/2/08 to remind us of how things should be:

I awoke to Targhee reporting 14″, with 12” after the lifts closed. I met up with Sheila and Geno and everybody else in the universe! Targhee had a new innovation today- crowds! The longest lift line I’ve ever seen for the opening of DC extend way out each end of the lift maze. It was gone by the time we got back for the second ride, but it was back and stayed back for every ride after that. Liftlines everywhere and people were all over the hill. A small powder drought in an epic winter, broken by a sunny weekend powder morning caused the trouble. The skiing, while OK wasn’t epic, just wind compressed powder that you sunk into about 6-8 inches, so it was easy and fun stuff. I stayed until one o’clock and enjoyed finding lots of untracked outside the gate above Northern Light’s northward bend even at that late hour.

Tags: climate change, Grand Targhee, powder, SNOTEL, winter
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