Before I skied properly, I barely looked at the weather.
If there was a sun symbol, great. If there was a snowflake, even better. That was about the extent of my forecasting knowledge.
Then skiing gets its claws into you and suddenly you’re checking freezing levels before bed, looking at wind direction over breakfast and refreshing a resort webcam because the picnic table had 10cm on it an hour ago and now appears to have 14.
This is apparently a normal hobby.
The annoying part is that it actually helps. Spend enough time in the mountains and you eventually realise that “20cm of snow tomorrow” tells you surprisingly little about whether tomorrow will actually be any good.
My "Quick" Weather Check Before I Ski
Freezing level
One of the first things I check. It tells you far more than a little snowflake icon about whether you're getting powder, wet snow or rain.
Wind
Important for lift closures, wind chill and where the snow actually ends up after a storm.
Overnight snow + temperature
I care more about when the snow fell and how cold it was than the headline 24-hour total.
Cloud and visibility
Great snow isn't much fun if you can't see the next roll in the terrain.
Webcams and actual reports
By breakfast, these can be more useful than another forecast app.
Avalanche forecast
If I'm heading into avalanche terrain, this becomes a separate and much more serious check. Local avalanche bulletins always take priority over a general weather forecast.
The stuff I actually look at
If snow is forecast, I want to know when it’s arriving, how cold it’ll be, where the freezing level sits and what the wind is doing.
That’s most of it.
Twenty centimetres overnight can be brilliant. Twenty centimetres spread thinly over three days is rather less exciting. Twenty centimetres falling cold and dry is not the same thing as 20cm landing at about 1°C and immediately turning into mashed potato.
The freezing level is probably the number I check first now. I ignored it for years, but it tells you a lot. Rain in town can still mean snow higher up, and a small change in temperature can move the decent snow hundreds of metres up or down the mountain.
What happened overnight matters too. A warm afternoon followed by a proper freeze can turn yesterday’s soft snow into heavy crap.
This is why telling me “it snowed yesterday” isn’t enough anymore.
I need details.
This is how the illness starts.
Wind ruins everything
Okay, not everything. But it has ruined enough promising ski days that I pay attention to it now.
A big snowfall forecast looks much less exciting when the wind is howling. Lifts close, exposed slopes get stripped and all that lovely new snow gets deposited somewhere other than the bit you were planning to ski.
If you know a resort well, this becomes quite useful. You start learning which areas get hammered in certain wind directions and which little sheltered corners quietly collect snow while everyone else is complaining.
You also learn that the temperature forecast can be a complete liar about how cold you’re actually going to feel.
Snowfall numbers make people stupid
I’m including myself here.
Skiers see a big centimetre number and immediately lose all perspective.
Five? Meh.
Twenty-five? Right, can I move that meeting/funeral/wedding?
But mountain snowfall totals are messy. Elevation matters, wind matters, exactly where the measurement was taken matters. And forecasts can miss badly even quite close to the event.
This is why I love resort webcams.
By the morning, I’ll often trust a crappy webcam image more than another model telling me what was supposed to happen overnight.
You eventually end up with preferred snow gauges too. A particular fence. A bench. The roof of the lift station.
There are probably people doing useful things with their mornings while I’m zooming in on a picnic table in the Alps.
Their loss.
Sometimes the best snow still makes for a crap day
Visibility is the bit I probably underestimated most when I was younger.
You can have genuinely great snow and barely enjoy it because you can’t see a bloody thing.
Flat light on an open mountain can make even fairly easy terrain feel horrible. The definition just disappears. Small bumps and rolls vanish until you’re already riding over them, and suddenly you feel much worse at skiing than you did yesterday.
That changes where I go.
If the upper mountain is socked in, I’m usually looking for trees, lower terrain or anywhere with some contrast rather than blindly chasing the deepest reported snow. This is one of the reasons Japan is so freaking good – the entire resorts are this terrain!
This is also why I don’t think there is one single definition of “good ski weather”. Fresh powder under blue skies is obviously the jackpot, but sometimes a slightly worse snow surface somewhere you can actually see is much more fun.
Avalanche forecasts are different
One important distinction before somebody hulks out in me in the comments.
A general mountain weather forecast is not an avalanche forecast.
If I’m going into avalanche terrain, I’m checking the proper local avalanche bulletin separately. Snowpack structure, recent avalanche activity, wind loading and the specific problems being reported need their own assessment.
I’m deliberately not turning this article into an avalanche lecture. That deserves much more than a throwaway paragraph.
Just don’t assume that because you’ve spent twenty minutes staring at Windy you now understand what the snowpack is doing.
And that’s how they get you
At some point, none of this feels like homework anymore.
You actually start enjoying it. Gross, right?
A storm appearing on the forecast six days out is exciting even though you know perfectly well it’ll probably disappear by Tuesday. A dropping freezing level becomes good news. You start recognising favourable wind directions at resorts you’ve visited far too many times.
Then somebody casually asks what the weather is going to be like tomorrow.
And instead of saying “cold”, like a normal person, you ask:
“At what altitude?”
Congratulations.
You’re one of us.
