We ended up with nearly 4 inches of snow/sleet mash Monday night into Tuesday morning. Then we put a nice icy crust on it Tuesday afternoon. For once, some cold air was around to put up resistance to the warm side of a storm.
This snow isn’t the sexy powder we love to ride. But at this stage in the game, we needed a masher like this to start laying the base down. With much of the precipitation done and temperatures only expected to rise into the 30s for Wednesday, the mash will have surprising staying power.
Midweek Outlook:
Well, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to come from any real distance to ride what we got now. But a couple of people were able to spin a few miles on Powley Road today:
Again, totally “at your own risk” riding. But I place this picture up to show that places like Powley Road, Moose River Plains and Perkins Clearing do have a base to build upon. Needless to say, the Indian Lake/Speculator village trails are NOT anywhere near ready for traffic.
Weekend Outlook:
A strong westerly flow over the very warm Lake Ontario could give the western Adirondacks a good pasting of lake-effect snow on New Year’s Day:
This would place the early season hangouts in play for this weekend, something that seemed nearly unthinkable last week when Indian Lake set its all-time record high for Christmas eve at 62*F!
Longer Range:
This is when I normally delve into serious weather geekery. But this time, I’ll just let Joe Cioffi handle this as he does a masterful job of laying out the pattern change that is to come for mid-January:
Joe’s specific forecasting area is around New York City, but he does solid long-range, big-picture weather pattern analysis as well. You can check out his site at:
http://www.meteorologistjoecioffi.com/
To be sure, I’m highly confident of the major pattern shift that I talked about last week. The winter event we got Monday night and the possible lake-event snow event for New Year’s is nice. But I caution you that were are in transition between what we had for much of December and what I expect by mid-January.
In other words, there may be a “hurt” lurking for us before we get to the real fun in mid-January. I never promised this would be easy, but we’ll get there!
For the ilsnow nation,
Darrin
