Snow Farming Meltdown

Last weekend was not a good weekend weather wise for snow retention. Before this past weekend, we enjoyed about 4 weeks of early season skiing. The base remained constant but provided some great skiing. About 2 weeks out from the meltdown, I saw some indicators that it could get warm. Maybe it wouldn't but had to assume it would. I beginning clearing snow from fields, the basketball court, our deck, our patio not before starting with the ice rink that had snow from Thanksgiving that hadn't been cleared. Focused on about 5km of trail that was mostly skaters waltz. I wasn't going to blog this but Jonell said I should document it and hopefully I can look back down the road and say "glad I don't have to do that again".

God willing, I will never own a snowblower. I can't stand the things. When I clear the ice rink, I use my skates and 3" or less can knock out in 20 minutes. It's a great workout and I get the ice relatively "clean".

With the snow that was on the rink, I was able to get three pickup loads.

The pickup loads went near the start and big south facing slope hill "kamikaze" on skaters waltz.

Pulling snow from a field.

 Don Camp (above) passing through from West Yellowstone training camp to Michigan. During the four weeks we had skiable snow, just a few people came out to ski. Quite honestly, it was disappointing how few people came out skiing. The majority of people were from out of state!   We had just one skier from Detroit Lakes and no ski team members. Quite a change from years past where local hs kids would be ecstatic to be skiing on the snow we had. With Detroit Mountain opening up, the ski team has been skiing there and also pulling local skiers.

Hard not to look back to a year ago. Grooming exactly one year ago from the photo above of Don.

Taking snow off the court. Taking advantage of the moonlight during the short day.

Spreading another pickup load on kamikaze hill.

Grooming it out later in the day.

Building up the start area.

After a week of hauling snow in the truck, I walked along 80% of the trail, shoveling what snow there  was to the middle.

Where there was more snow to work with, I used sleds.

Fog and frost moving in. The frost was beautiful on the trees before it got to warm to convert the frog to frost.

Taking snow from the deck.

Istevan from South Dakota driving up 6 hours one way for a day of skiing.

Saturday morning the coverage was still very good and had a awesome Saturday morning ski. But from 10am that morning to Sunday evening, the temp only went up and never cooled down.

We had to cancel a ski camp with 200 kids from four different teams. Major bummer. It was tough to stomach the warm weather after all that shoveling but thankful for the good skiing days before the melt. Jens's home hockey tournament and a lot of ping pong games with Jon helped ease the torture. Ha!

Monday morning after it finally cooled down, went out for a run to check out the scene. It was not pretty. The upside is that that some of the melt froze to a solid base.

This slope had a lot of snow transport but just couldn't hang on.

Next night we had a dusting but not enough to groom or even ski. At least it is white!

Weather pattern looks bit more favorable next 2 weeks. All it will take is 3-4" to get gliding again. Soon it will come!! Think Snow!!