Trail Talk Tuesday 10.24.23
Chance of snow between now and 10/30/23 – 0 Percent
Chance of snow between 10/31/23 and 11/6/23 – 50 Percent
Good morning Upstate Snow Nation! And boy are you guys awake! First of all, THANK YOU SO MUCH for FINALLY pushing our total beyond 15,000! Yeah! And our followers exceeding 16K is also an accomplishment. For the hundreds of new folks on to my site: THANK YOU! I hope you enjoy the experience.
Well the frost and freeze we just lost this morning? I hope you enjoyed it because it’s GONE. For at least a week. And probably only about a week to 10 days at this point is my guesstimate on when the warmth will run out and the cold shall return.
We are looking at clouds giving way to sun and temperatures shooting well into the 60s today! Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday? How about record highs? How about 70s with a few lower elevation locations taking a shot at 80??? What the heck? It’s nearly the end of October! But this weekend… as is the case every dang weekend now… rain showers. It moves in just in time for the weekend and shall move out gradually by Monday 10/30, when instead of near record 70s, we are back into the 50s. Which by Halloween is about NORMAL.
The last time we had a big late October warm spell like this was in 1991. I was in high school and remember that late October very well. It turned out almost exactly like this. Don’t blink because 1991-92 was a poor year for riding with very low snow totals across Upstate NY.
But looking to Halloween and beyond, what are we seeing? We are seeing a very high chance of near to below normal temperatures. And remember once you hit November through March and start talking anything below normal on temperatures… you start to talk about the potential for snow. Now in early November average highs are still in the low 50s so below normal means usually 30s and 40s by day which means if any snow does happen to fall between 10/31 and 11/6, it is very likely not going to stick. Only in the big winter of 1995/96 did it stick from the first week of November through the entire winter into April. That was a major winter! In 2018-19, the last decent winter we had, the big 6-12 inches of snow arrived in the second week of November, not the first. The lakes froze up Thanksgiving weekend, and it stayed this way with snow in the Adirondacks and Tug Hill through April. It did not stay like this over the rest of Upstate NY but it still turned out to be a much better winter than any winter seen since.
So we shall see what God has in store for us. Until then, enjoy your unseasonably warm end of October!
Rich
