Favorite Inconvenient Weather Event

[GoodTimes]

What is your most memorable Grinch Storm (in or out of holiday season) or inconvenient weather event/period

in recent memory:

Mine is the few days before Christmas 2013. Unlike this storm, which looks like a violent monster of high wind, heavy rain, and west side blizzard. I think 2013 was maybe one day of wintry mix up and down the east, one day of driving rain and warm temps. Really sucked. A lot of snow pack into the mid Atlantic (a lot of NW NJ XC/BC) Rest of the winter season was great though

the other was early feb. 2016 on a trip to LP. Now that was an awful season. Great conditions one day, then two days later I remember watching the southern storm track in from the summit. Skied fresh snow all day, then got soaked skiing down to the parking lot. Not a meltdown, but rain at 33 degrees is memorable

 

[Milo Maltbie]

One year (2016?) we did a trip to Lake Placid on MLK weekend. Skiing was startiing to be a pretty good until a Friday downpour and the temperature got up into the 60s for maybe 12 hours. It was unbelievable. DOT was spotting crews at the bridges on 73 to close them down if they got unstable, and several roads and bridges in the area washed out. Then it got wicked cold again.
Gott love skiing n the East.

mm

 

[Face4Me]

These are a couple of pictures I keep on my phone to remind me of how bad things can be ... and how quickly it can turn around.

This shot was taken on December 27, 2015.

And this shot was taken on January 3, 2016, exactly one week later, from the exact same spot.

So, you never know what can happen, however, with respect to Whiteface this year, and the complete disaster that has been the snowmaking operation to this point, I'm not really seeing a silver lining without Mother Nature's help.

 

[Harvey]

complete disaster

What is happening?

 

[Face4Me]

What is happening?

As mentioned in the Whiteface Conditions thread .. .

• Snowmaking seems to be operating at a much reduced capacity than in years past.
• They're making snow on parts of trails, for example, only the upper part of Paron's Run ... Only the upper part of Mountain Run ... sections of Boreen, etc. It's hard to understand what the plan is, unless the thought is that they're going to "push" snow around with snow cats, instead of actually making snow on the entire trail. That seems like a pretty unusual approach. Or, maybe the idea is that you can ski part of the trail, and then walk through the mud the rest of the way, like in the picture above!
• They have not made any attempt to make snow on Lower Northway or Victoria ... This has left us in a sustained "White Ribbon Of Death" (WROD) mode from the top of Little Whiteface.

It all seems very odd.

Also, just to mention, it's not my intent to be "critical" ... it just seems somewhat obvious that there must be some kind of a problem, but, instead of being straight-forward and telling people "Hey ... we have a problem with the system, we're doing everything we can to try to fix it as quickly as possible", they just keep talking about how great things are. The reality is, things aren't great. There's no doubt ... the weather did not cooperate in November, and there's NOTHING anyone can do about that, nor does anyone expect anything. But, having said that, for the last 3 weeks or so, temperatures have been much more friendly for snowmaking, and it just seems that they should have been able to get a lot more done by now.