Western North America Conditions 2025/26

Also posted some of this in Shasta thread that @jamesdeluxe brought back from the dead

From Mt Ashland's Mountain Report Page: "Beginning Thursday, January 15, 2026, Mt. Ashland Ski Area is forced to pause Ski Operations indefinitely due to low snowpack, warm weather in the forecast and no snowfall projected. All terrain and chairlifts are closed." They report 15" at Base, 24" mid-mountain and 0" at top on 42" season snowfall.

There are rumors that Willamette Pass who reports 3/6 lifts and 7/30 trails open and an11" base after 36" season snowfall could be next.
 
I am currently at Mustang. Surprisingly skiing is better than I was expecting. Clear blue skis and temps fluctuating around the freezing mark. As Tony speculated, we are predominantly skiing in the alpine. We have been getting predominantly spring like conditions with some recrystallized snow and also some corn on south facing slopes. Surfaces are predominantly soft, but certainly not fresh powder.

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Skieric said:
We have been getting predominantly spring like conditions with some recrystallized snow and also some corn on south facing slopes. Surfaces are predominantly soft, but certainly not fresh powder.
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That warm? If the south facing corn is from rain, I'd expect north facing to be bulletproof. One possible explanation: it snowed but was very high water content snow that is more likely to transition to spring conditions on sunny exposures. That's still surprising at 50 degrees latitude in January though.
 
Tony Crocker said:
That warm? If the south facing corn is from rain, I'd expect north facing to be bulletproof. One possible explanation: it snowed but was very high water content snow that is more likely to transition to spring conditions on sunny exposures. That's still surprising at 50 degrees latitude in January though.
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Rain was predominantly below 6000 feet, and moisture petered ot when temperatures warmed above freezing to 10000 feet. Somehow sun actually feels warm now. Lows around 20 and highs upper 20’s. Lower elevation that got full on rain are indeed bulletproof. Higher elevations have varying surfaces that are carvable to soft depending on aspect. Best skiing has been alpine with some afternoon softening of lower elevation rain crust in the afternoon. Snow has been developing facet changes, corn and some surface hoar depending on aspect, elevation, wind exposure. Overall guides are finding fun lines and the group is having a good time, however 2 feet of fresh powder would be better.
 
Competent guides can often extract maximum fun from challenging circumstances. But the key is that weather is allowing you to stay above tree/rain line. This is the third Mustang TR posted on FTO that has more challenging conditions than any of my 10 tours. Hopefully that will change before Tseeb arrives Feb. 20.
 
The forecast for Whistler is depressing. The GDPS, GFS and ECMWF are all in agreement that precipitation in the next 10 days is negligible. If the forecast verifies, Whistler will be approaching 3 weeks without any meaningful precipitation and 3 weeks where off piste is largely unskiable due to rain up to 2400 meters.

Advanced and expert skiers would be best to avoid Whistler for the foreseeable future unless they are okay with fast groomers and fabulous views.

For most of my ski season, I try to be flexible and not book Whistler ski days in advance. The only exception in recent years has been the last week of January. If this forecast verifies, of the last 4 years, 3 will have had icy conditions where off piste was unskiable following a similar pattern.

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takeahike46er said:
Whistler will be approaching 3 weeks without any meaningful precipitation and 3 weeks where off piste is largely unskiable due to rain up to 2400 meters.
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That was 6 weeks in 2005. But normally the PNW gets frequent enough winter storms that these conditions don't last too long. I'm not pleased as I hit the road for Canada Feb. 8 and it doesn't look I'm likely to see good conditions anywhere along the way.
takeahike46er said:
For most of my ski season, I try to be flexible and not book Whistler ski days in advance.
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I've never thought of Whistler that way. Rain into the alpine like Jan. 7-8 is fairly rare. To me the risk is that the alpine is inaccessible due to visibility or snow stability during/after storms, similar to Mammoth. I've never had bad snow in the Whistler alpine on destination trips in 1991, 1998, 2005, 2008, 2015, 2017. I know I was lucky in 2005 and 2015, which had some long stretches with the conditions takeahike46er describes now.
 
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EMSC said:
Wow, the snow is so bad they actually have you doing some touring? Or is it more traversing in/out of areas.
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By the 3rd day, we had skied a lot of the alpine and 4 of us wanted to try touring to do something different and therefore approached the guide with a request to try some touring. For me, I had never done skinning before and felt this was an excellent opportunity to try it with excellent guide support. The run we did with touring had cat access to the top, but no lower cat access. Therefore we skinned up about 15 minutes to get back to a cat road, however the majority of the vertical was by snowcat. One person in our group was over 120 days at Mustang and this was the first time he had skied this run.
 
jamesdeluxe said:
I'm considering getting a base grind to prepare for my visit to Colorado in two weeks. :eusa-think:
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No, you will need the base grind AFTER your visit to Colorado in two weeks. :icon-lol:

Skieric said:
By the 3rd day, we had skied a lot of the alpine and 4 of us wanted to try touring to do something different and therefore approached the guide with a request to try some touring. For me, I had never done skinning before and felt this was an excellent opportunity to try it with excellent guide support. The run we did with touring had cat access to the top, but no lower cat access. Therefore we skinned up about 15 minutes to get back to a cat road, however the majority of the vertical was by snowcat.
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The small group/steep chutes groups are told that they may do some hiking or skinning to reach places not accessible by snowcat. I wondered about 5th Dimension when skieric mentioned it. It's Mustang's longest run over over 5,000 vertical and the lower half would be very unpleasant right now. I skied it once in 2019 and we still traversed out after 4,000 vertical. One other time I believe I skied a just the top 1,000 with a direct cat pickup. With Eric's presumably intermediate length run it probably required the skinning to get out to a cat pickup.
 
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