Mother Nature seems poised to atone for the misery she visited on Northwest skiers last winter.
Snow started piling up in the Cascade Mountains late last week, and higher-elevation ski areas are preparing for their earliest openings in more than a decade.
"To say it's snowing is an understatement," said Tiana Enger, sales and marketing director for Crystal Mountain Ski Area. "I can barely see across the plaza from my office."
The snow should continue through the next five days — and maybe longer, said University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass.
"Already this winter we're starting off big," he said. "The rest of the week is going to be great for snow above 4,000 feet."
Crystal plans to open Friday, which would be the earliest in 28 years. Mount Baker Ski Area is aiming for Tuesday.
"We're expecting another 3 to 4 feet of new snow between now and then," spokeswoman Gwyn Howat said. The last time Mount Baker opened so early was 1993.
Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia expects to open Saturday, nearly three weeks ahead of schedule.
Lower-elevation areas, like the Summit at Snoqualmie, are hoping for a big dump in the coming days.
"We really won't know until we see what materializes out of this big storm," said Jon Pretty, public-relations manager for the Summit.
After suffering through the worst ski season on record last year, the state's resorts are looking forward to what forecasters say will be a more typical winter.
"I would be really shocked if we went through and didn't have a reasonable ski season," said Brad Colman, science officer for the National Weather Service's Seattle office.
A weak El Niño coupled with high-pressure ridges off the coast conspired last year to deflect storms away from Washington and to other parts of the country — including California's Sierra Nevada, where Mammoth Mountain ski area got record snowfall.
 |
This year, there's neither an El Niño nor its cooler sibling, La Niña, Colman said.
But normal doesn't mean boring in the Northwest.
"Neutral years tend to be our most exciting weather years," said Mass, of UW.
Big snowstorms, big windstorms and drenching Pineapple Express rainfalls typically occur in neutral years.
Which means this week's big snowfalls could quickly be erased by a warm downpour, Mass cautioned.
"The key note of this kind of winter is variability."
The month that just ended was also fairly normal in terms of sogginess.
October saw slightly more than 3 inches of rain in Seattle, spread out over 22 days.
Even for a month with an average 3.19 inches of rain, the number of dreary days was high, said National Weather Service meteorologist Gary Schneider. Usually, October is rainy only 43 percent of the time — or about 13 days out of 31.
Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
