Colorado Powder Forecast and Crested Butte Snowfall
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Colorado Powder Forecast is a new website that has been getting a lot of praise, but I thought I would heap on a little more. CO skiers know how fickle our storms can be, and this website seeks to make a little more sense of it all. Check out the “education” tab, for starters, to get up to speed. I’ve learned a lot over the years reading NOAA’s forecast discussion, but this site was a lot easier to understand. Perhaps the best part of the posts is the humor, though- the last couple of posts featured cheerleaders cheering on the oncoming storm, and a Dalmatian representing how spotty the storm was. Combined with NOAA, and the Avalanche center’s forecasts, CO skiers now have a lot of tools at their disposal for weather forecasting. The link is always available on the right sidebar of this blog.
Here in Crested Butte, our snowfall is very dependent on wind direction. Storms coming straight from the South tend to drop all their snow in the San Juans. SW flow can be good, but the more “W”, the better, as true SW flow can once again favor the San Juans. W flow is the best of all, as there are no big mountains to the West of Crested Butte that can steal all the snow. NW flow produces the infamous “Crested Butte Donut Hole”, a frustrating situation when all the mountains surrounding the resort get snow, while the resort sits in a rain shadow and gets very little. Still, the backcountry can get many feet of snow out of these systems, so it’s not the end of the world. Storms out of the N can drop some snow up at Schofield Pass, but usually these storms just make it cold. Other directions are rare and don’t drop any snow around Crested Butte. That’s it for the CB Snow Forecast. This weekend’s storm is currently on track as a Westerly Flow, so cross your fingers…
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