Greetings and welcome!
They had to cancel the High Falls radar runs last Saturday because of the weather. We had a couple of inches of snow Friday and Friday night and then enough rain and warm weather to turn it into slop. It did not get cold enough Friday night to freeze it, so the lake would have had a lot of water and slop on it. It would be a terrible idea to send rocket sleds down that at 120+mph. It was a good call to cancel it even though a lot of people put a lot of work into making it happen.
The Twin Bridge Ski Team is the sponsor of the radar runs, and the radar runs and Winterfest are major fundraisers for them. The weather has not been smiling on their events recently. Hopefully a lot of people will support them when conditions come back around.
At any rate, the slop did finally freeze up Saturday night and Sunday. Now there is a crusty snow on top of an ice base. This did help untreated roads. Main highways are bare from the salt and above freezing weather. Side roads are hit n miss depending on if that area saw salt sand while it was warm out. Untreated roads have a nice start on an ice base.
Looking out of the window I have anywhere from bare ground up to 2-3 inches of crusty snow over some ice. Trails will not open until we get some snow.
There is no snow in the short term forecast. The next possible snow is a small storm for about the 25th, next Monday. The European model says that we could get up to 4-5″ out of that one.
Farther out in the 16 day GFS forecast model there are a couple of better storms showing up toward the end of the month. Maybe those will turn into something, and hopefully that something is a pattern change that will put us into a snowier weather pattern.
We have talked about this before with ElNino and LaNina years where there is frequently hope for a storm two weeks out that never comes. See Charlie Brown/Lucy/football. I do believe that this will turn around eventually, I just hope that it is soon.
When I was in Crooked Lake Saturday I asked the bartender how much ice that they had and he said about 10″. There was an incident where someone was walking on High Falls late last week and they went through. Be very careful on the lakes. It hasn’t been a great ice year either.
It was a passing thought the other day that if we had gotten a lot of snow in the beginning of the season this would have been a very comfortable year for riding with most days in the 20s or low 30s. If only we could have gotten some snow…
I don’t have much more this afternoon so I am going to wrap it up. Have a good week and thank you for visiting!
RJB