Give or take a few days, we are smack bang in the middle of the season.
June & July down, with August, September, and hopefully a week of October to go.
Despite the marketing guff you see around the traps, it hasn’t exactly been a bumper season, but it has been far from a shocker either. Until the last 10 days there has been a fairly consistent procession of weather systems since before the June Long Weekend – many of them bringing snow, but a few key systems did not set up in a manner that has favoured Buller, and has brought rain, and freezing rain, even when the temperatures were below zero. Quite a few storms have been what I like to call a ‘shit sandwich’ – rain followed by snow followed by rain, for little or no nett gain. Here are some charts published on the ski.com.au forums by member ‘skidown’ that illustrate our progress so far, and compare it to the 3 previous seasons:
As you will see we got off to a good start, which was turbocharged during the first week of July, but we have recently dipped due to some unseasonally warm temperatures, which has led the prophets of snow doom to proclaim the season over. I always find that quite amusing. Just because the bottom of Cow Camp is history doesn’t mean that we won’t have 8-10 good weeks of skiing up high & on the South Side of the mountain. I’m always happy if we can ski down to there for about 4 weekends of the season and make the most of it while it’s open.
The main drag of Federation was only skiable for a few short days, and the better skiing in the Bull Run bowl has been tantalisingly close for the past 3-4 weeks, only needing a further 20-30cm of snow. It has arrived a couple of times in fact, but was washed away. There seems to be a lot of snow in the Fast One area however.
I had a particularly fun day on Sunday:
However what comes next is pretty pivotal to the outcome of the season. As you will see from the graph, 2009 had a pretty ordinary August, which led to a dismal September. In recent memory I can think of 2002 which got off to a strong start but faded in August, however I can think of many more years where August had a good gain in snow depth. I am particularly hoping for this as September is by far the best month to ski, but due to the warm Spring temperatures you need to kick the month off with a decent base if you are going to make it through to October.
The good news is that it looks like there is a little snow on the way. Naturally it will start as rain on Saturday, but Jane’s Weather has predicted it to turn to snow by Saturday evening, continuing through the weekend and into the week.
