Southwest Nordic Ski Club

The last couple of weeks have not been kind to our snow conditions, but with some effort from the groomers, it’s still going. Believe it or not, there’s still a continuously snow-covered trail from start to finish, but maybe only for one or two more days. The front hill has a couple of very narrow spots and will need to be portaged after this heat spell. But, it’s supposed to snow starting Thursday.

I got out tonight with the grooming stuff and set the tiller down deep to smooth out all the funky meltdown snow. It was mostly successful, but not everything smoothed out perfectly. It really needs to snow to be fully resuscitated. Fingers crossed.

For now, it’s really only groomed for skate, but classic skiing will be ok without the track. Also, I spent some time clearing more tree debris and the rest of that tree that came down out in the meadow.

Be careful if you do go ski, and bring your rock skis. There’s now a lot of tree trash and thin spots, but we’re still skiing.

The meadow trail loop really got a lot of attention so it’s back to looking pretty good. Otherwise it’s really a spring skiing mixed bag of conditions.

We’ll keep things going after this next forecasted storm, but unless the there’s another one to save us, next week might be the finale for this season. Stay tuned and get in some skiing before we pull the plug…

There are some choice words about all of that wind and the mess it made, which had to be cleaned up by a hardy grooming armada of 3 old guys. It was not the most most fun 5.5 hrs, but hopefully we’ve salvaged the trails and still good snow for some more late season skiing.

So far, we’ve only managed to clear trees and some really messy tree-top and branch explosions that caused a lot of messy debris fields. Things aren’t groomed yet, but we did manage to get stuff kind of bladed and packed out from all the traffic to get to the tree-clearing messes.

We got probably 99% of the debris cleaned up, but there’s still a lot of sticks, pine bows, cones, and bark embedded in the snow, so be careful. There was somehow even a tree that fell across the trail out in the meadow and got encapsulated in a drift. Talk about adding insult to injury 😒

Not sure when it’ll be groomed, so stay tuned. We’re working with a skeleton crew of old-guy volunteers, whose backs will need to recover from last night and tonight’s cleanup…

Just a quick PSA: it’s super warm and the snow is very sensitive/vulnerable to degradation from all sorts of traffic, including skiing. Please consider NOT skiing during the warm/melty part of the day. Wait until late afternoon or the morning so as to preserve what we have. Hopefully, we’ll see some sort of return to winter next week…

In the meantime, here are some recent photos of grooming in the early evening — the longer days mean it’s not completely dark during the first round of grooming. Unfortunately, the conditions will NOT look like this after this week. UGH.

Temperatures are headed into the meltdown range this week. As such, please consider not skiing, and especially snowshoeing, during the warm time of the day. It’s quite detrimental to the conditions.

It was a busy holiday weekend. Most of the trails were cleaned up but it’s a variable mix of conditions and not everywhere has a classic track.

Conditions are dependent on the grooming. Freeze-thaw weather and grooming frequency is like a jar of mayonnaise sitting out on the kitchen counter. If you don’t do something about it in a couple of days, it goes bad pretty fast. Hopefully we still have some base after this hot spell.

So, please refrain from using the trails as much as possible, especially while it’s warm. Looks like a weather change is in store next week…

Got things groomed nicely Friday night with a lot of passes with the groomers. Went back out Saturday evening to clean the lower Guaje Trail and to get a better classic track on the lower trails, below Point-J. It should ski very nicely for classic. Today was pretty interesting with that cold foggy air mass rolling in. It was noticeably colder at the bottom of the system than out in the meadow near the high point.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Trails have been groomed extensively during this past week, after the great round of storms of last week, which totaled 18 to 20 inches. Days are warming up with the southwest winds and flow from the south, but hopefully temps moderate in the 40s, which is not too bad. It’s supposed to cool off over Friday and Saturday, but maybe warm again early next week.

As of this morning, things looked great, but will start changing with the freeze/thaw cycle.

Please choose colder hours to ski or snowshoe to preserve the trail conditions. Skiing, and especially snowshoeing in the middle of the day causes some ruts and etc. that refreeze and are hard to groom out.