I used to visit my cousins when they lived in El Paso, TX and the closest ski resort was Ski Apache in Southern New Mexico. I only rode there a couple of times but it was a fun mountain with some open bowls at the top and some glades and fun terrain. The only trick is getting there alive on the one lane road up to the resort along the edge of cliffs with no guard rail. They only allow traffic to go up the mountain in the morning and down in the afternoon.
With the snow turned off over much of the country right now New Mexico and Southern Colorado are the places really getting decent snow the next few days. The cold front responsible for bringing light snow down the Rockies the past few days and lots of cold to the West, is now down into Arizona and New Mexico. A cut-off low has formed over Arizona and it will push into New Mexico on Saturday before coming with another cold front coming South this weekend and heading East.
There will be around 3-6 inches of snow today in Flagstaff, AZ and resorts like Snowbowl and then East into the Taos area of News Mexico on Saturday. There will be a heavier band of snow that will setup from South to North across Central New Mexico and into Southern CO . That band should drop 6-12 inches on Saturday in those areas and for those of you venturing out to Ski Apache you could see over a foot of snow on the mountain. Teluride in Southern CO could pick up as much as 10-15 slopes on the South facing slopes with 20:1 snow ratios making for powdery snow.
We could see continued light snow over the area Sunday and Monday as another cold front pushes South down the Rockies all the way to New Mexico again. Snow amounts with this cold front are expected to be much lighter. Below is the total precip map through Monday over the Southwest.
Take advantage of the snow falling now over the Southern Rockies and the Southwest because once we go into the La Nina Winter the snowfall should be below average. Yesterday some updated Winter forecasts came out for snowfall. The first one below is the forecast from WeatherBell.
And here is the one from Accuweather.
They are pretty similar except for Tahoe. But the Weatherbell forecast doesn’t start until you hit 110% and Accuweather starts at anything over 100%. My person forecast for Tahoe from the Fall was for 105% of average snowfall. As you can see from this map there are places like the Northeast Tahoe that have not had that much snowfall yet but are shown to have above average snowfall this season. The point is that it’s not Winter yet, so we haven’t even really gotten started yet. BA