Ski Season Trend: Improving?

So far at the Summit at Snoqualmie, the 2013/14 ski season is pretty bad.  Let's be honest about it.  The question is not whether we can recover from this and still some time on the slopes this year, but what is the outlook for the next few years?

Should we even bother investing in season passes if the trend is going to be as bad as this year, or are we in for killer pow?

I used about 60 years of snowfall data to answer these questions for you.  My prediction?  Summit will have awesome years coming up, and you won't want to miss out on them.

In 1956 Summit had a pretty bad year, but notice how it kept getting better and better until about 1970 when it started to slowly decline.

Then, in 1976 it hit rock bottom again but improved until another slump in about 1990.  The cycle continued where the snowfall increased and the skiing was awesome until it hit rock bottom again in 2013.

If we assume that this cycle is repetitive, it could be argued that we are right at the beginning of an increase in snowfall and great ski conditions for at least a solid 20 years, if you can believe it!

So, do not despair.  Our current conditions are literally a sign that we have many many years of killer conditions to look forward to!

Learn About Tableau

Notice that there seems to be a pattern that suggests that there is a cycle of several good years of snow and then a decline, before it curves back up to several more years of snow. This is not a scientific study, only a reflection on the available data. In my book, this means that yes, we've had bad years over time, but that we are in a position where we are potentially about to see several awesome years of skiing as long we remember that patience is a virtue.

Snowrider Clean Up Success!

No one said it was going to be easy, and it wasn't.  Not by a long shot.  Today I volunteered with the Seattle Chapter of the Surfriders for their all-mountain clean up event at The Summit.  This past season I basically "discovered" Alpental for myself, and then spent 5 months there from December until April tearing it up.

I never actually dropped any trash or equipment, but after having a season pass for 6 years, I thought I'd better help clean up the mountain for some karma points.

I decided to immediately head up the mountain and pick up trash along the path of Armstrong Express chair...seen in the picture to the right.  This was much more daunting than I imagined it was going to be.  First of all there's no real "path" to follow under the chair at all, so you have to sort of meander along the cable lines looking for spots to hike and stay relatively centered under the chair in order pick up any cans, bottles, lift tickets, broken equipment etc. that is typically the left over debris from a ski season under the lifts.

The underbrush is very thick and rugged, and was very difficult to navigate.  There are a lot of places where you can lose your footing and slip into deeper underbrush, and it really was a lot more effort than I anticipated.

Here's a picture looking down the slope next to Armstrong Express chair where I started to have to veer off a bit from the chair path due to a very fast running stream and series of short waterfalls along the path.

If you ski Alpental, you know this area well, as you pass over it on the chair and look down to see hints of rushing water under deep snow.

I continued up as far as I could considering that I had two trash bags with me.  What I didn't anticipate was that the thick underbrush would of course start to tear apart my bag, so I double-bagged it to prevent it from completely being unusable.

My original goal was to clean up trash all the way to the top of Armstrong Express, then double back down and head down towards Sessel.  This whole plan changed as my trash bag started filling up more and more to the point where it was nearly unmanageable.

The problem I ran into with my goal of reaching the top of the chairlift was simple...my garbage bag became almost too heavy to carry back down the mountain.  I had not anticipated finding so much trash that I might not even be able to carry it off the mountain.  I guess I figured that I would only find a few beer cans and that would be it.

Lesson learned!  When we are all skiing up there it's so easy to enjoy the beautiful snow without realizing that there really is a lot of trash that gets hidden away over the winter and doesn't emerge until later.

Here's the path I hiked today picking up as much trash as I could at Alpental:

Screenshot Credit:  Google Earth

Here's the elevation profile from this route:

Screenshot Credit:  Geocontext-Profiler

All I can say is that all of the volunteers today were awesome!  Everyone picked up a lot of residual trash from a great ski season.  Whenever you are skiing or snowboarding up there, please be aware that any trash you toss off a chair, or along the slopes has to eventually be picked up by hand by an amazing group of volunteers that literally take it to the extreme to help keep the slopes beautiful for everyone.