The pd.o Guide to Snow Reports

What they really mean.

Evan Spence | 2004-04-06

There was a time when an anxious and excited 12 year old boy could call up the CKXL snow report on his touch tone phone and receive a fairly accurate accounting of what to expect for snow conditions in the mountain. Excellent meant skip school (and work, Dad), Very Good was either chopped powder or soft groomed, fair was hard pack, and poor meant stay home. (Or go to school or work.)

These days though, with one operator owning all the mountain resorts within reasonable driving distance, and with that same operator somehow in league with the media to ensure, er, consistency across all the snow reports, how is a 12 year old supposed to know when to play hooky?

Enter the pd.o.

Ski Pint Day

Excellent Conditions
Excellent conditions for us, but we tend to think anything more than our typical 2" of coverage over 3" rocks is pretty decent.
Excellent Conditions at Nakiska
The wind has died down enough that we managed to bribe some lifties to ride up and staff the Gold chair.
Very Good
As long as people keep believing the snow reports and dropping $50+ a day to slide on hard pack, we should make it to the end of the fiscal year. Very good!
Very Good at Fortress
Resorts of the Canadian Rockies hasn’t decommissioned the equipment yet.
Fair
Bring P-Tex.
Champagne Powder
It snowed! Lord Thunder & Jebus, it actually snowed! Never mind how many centimetres, it snowed!
76 of 106 runs open at Fernie
The bottom runs are submerged from the rainfall.
Excellent skiing and snowboarding on packed and machine groomed
What used to be an oxymoron is now embodied in the rebel yell of young sliders everywhere: “Fresh coy!” (i.e. the untouched, corduroy grooming tracks.) For further details, see Lake Louise.
Spring-like Conditions
We mean spring as in Easter, as in, we laid an egg. If you don’t have rock skis, then—good news!—you will after today.
X cm new in the last Y days
Just watch us stretch the reporting of this trace of snow. First, we’ll report new over the last 2, 3, 4 days, then snowfall for a week, then 8, 9, and 10 days, then we’ll go with “excellent sliding on packed and machine groomed” for a couple more weeks. After that, we’re looking at spring-like conditions until it snows again.
Trace New
So little snow fell we couldn’t even call it one centimetre. Believe us, if it was even a few millimetres, we would have rounded it up.
Great mid-season conditions
Let’s not dwell on the snow conditions. Instead, let’s focus on how long we’ve been open this season. Hey! Trooper is playing on the hill this afternoon. Come see that.

Those are your conditions. Enjoy the coy!

Evan Spence

Tuesday, April 6, 2004
PD DCXLVI

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