To all my fellow DCSkiers...Wishing you great schussing and a Happy New Year in 2007!
The Colonel

I have been thinking snow really hard for the last two days. Then I came home earlier and it was raining. lol so much for trying.

I am kicking off my New Year at Killington. We are leaving bright and early tomorrow morning and skiing Tues, Wed, and Thurs. I can't wait!!!

I am here to wish all the best.

And to claim first post of '07.

I'm glad to see snowmakers are working hard at the first of the year.

At this point I think that the entire ski season hangs in the balance for several ski areas. Although a few high temp records (within the mid-Atlantic) were set over the past 5 weeks, it hasn't been extremely warm most of the time....just warm enough to keep many ski areas from making snow at night. I don't think that I've ever seem such a LONG stretch of relatively mild weather and, worse yet, the mild weather is likely to continue for at least another 10 days in most of the mid-Atlantic. And, when the cold weather does finally arrive, it's going to have to stick around for more than a week to make it feasible for some ski areas to salvage the second half of the ski season. So, I'm afraid that the next 2 weeks will be "do or die" for a number of ski areas.

Trust me, I can speak for all snowmakers when I say we wish we really were hard at work.

Absolutely! The snowmaking management and staff at all of the resorts have done an incredible job under the most difficult conditions. They have been able to get as much snow down as possible, given the weather and limitations of the snowmaking equipment, which varies, depending on the ski area.

This weather has been excruciatingly painful to live through...I hope this year is an exception and not the new rule for the Mid-Atlantic.

All this doom & gloom is silly. Hold your breath another couple weeks and this whole thing will turn around. Until then I'm gonna enjoy the warm weather for what it is, and dream my powder dreams until the real thing comes along. The jet stream can't stay in this pattern forever!

I just can't see another Winter quite like this one (so far) with a warm period that lasts 6 WEEKS or more. [It's just a guess, but I'm figuring that the current mild spell will have lasted about 6 weeks in many parts of the mid-Atlantic when it's over.] It's seems that every time some cold weather has been predicted in the 10 or 15 day forecast, it's driven North by a strong up-swing in the Southern branch of the Jet Stream. News Flash! I just heard the weather report on TV 10 in Altoona, PA (located near Blue Knob) and Dec. 2006 was the 2nd warmest Dec. on record for Altoona.