Last days skiing to the road

 

I just looked through the blog posts for the last 3 Aprils to see how this year compares to springs past. Basically this year has been colder but with a lot less snow. Last year at this time the salmonberries were already blooming but the timing of last ski to the road was about the same - same for the year before. In 2023 there was a lot more snow than the last 3 years and we were skiing to the road until May.

This year it is hard to believe how quickly the snow is disappearing. A week ago I was still XC skiing up river canyons. Now there is barely enough snow at the pass to ski to the road, and it has been freezing at night and not raining either. The snow should be sticking around - BUT there is so little snow that there is not much of it to stick around. Around town there is a perception that this was a snowy winter - it wasn't. But it was cold so what snow we did get did not immediately melt but stuck around. So we had a thin cover of snow on the ground in town for most of the winter. But there was so little actual snow that I fear there will be no June skiing on Pyramid this year.

And around the house the ground in my garden beds is still frozen - no garlic sprouts - and while the crocuses have sprouted they have not bloomed. So basically my garden is a couple of weeks behind but we are losing our snowpack a lot earlier than usual. It may even be that we have already passed our max snow pack on the mountain and it happened like April 5th. But I'm still hoping that we get another dump of snow - fingers crossed but not very hopeful.

Patrick

The bottom image I found on the internet and it basically shows the snowpack for the state of Alaska on April 1rst. It looks like Kodiak is mostly at 25-50% of normal. That's pretty bad - we need snow to keep the rivers up for the salmon! I noticed that at 50% the middle of the island is doing better than the coast. I think that's because during the warm snap in late January and early February when we did get some warm rain in town and on Pyramid it actually snowed way up high in the middle of the island (like above 3000 feet).