Hedge clippers in the park

Although the mountain snowpack is the deepest in 15 years for early December, the valley floor isn't doing so well. Yesterday morning was the first time we've had snow in our yard this winter, about 6" worth.

I went to the Taggart Lake trailhead for a quick fishscale tour on a cold afternoon (11F, winds 5-10 mph). There wasn't any more snow there (6800') than there was at my house, which surprised me a little; only about 6-8" total, and less than that in some spots. The good news is that the bottom 3-4" was old snow that had turned almost bulletproof after last week's rain. That made for a good firm base to ski on.

There was a NY Times article a few days ago about how some nordic ski areas in New England have started snowmaking. "The number of days with snow on the ground in a typical year shrank by more than a month between 1965 and 2005, according to a study by University of New Hampshire researchers that appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2008."