First, good news. A cold front kicked up some lake moisture (most years it probably would have passed drier, but Superior isn’t anywhere near frozen) and kicked up some snow in Birkieland. Reports are of 3-4 inches on the trail. Yeah, that’ll help. Also most years we wouldn’t be celebrating a couple inches of snow. But that snow gives some immunity to a quick warm-up, and gives a lot more leeway for rolling and grooming going forwards.

As for the long range forecast, they’ve bounced around a lot, as usual. In the last couple of days they’ve shown rain, snow, warm and cold between now and race day. But for the most part, the next week looks cold to start and warmer to finish, with no real chance of any precipitation. Next week might jump in to the mid 30s a couple of days, but no snow-sapping 50 degree readings are on the horizon. Beyond that, there’s lots of variability, but I’ve not seen a model run in the past 24 hours which would cancel the race (50 and sunny, or warm rain with no new snow) and more than one which would get the course in good shape.

Here’s some pure conjecture (i.e. I’m making up these numbers as I go along): If you’d asked yesterday, I would have given the chances of a full course race at 50%, a modified but nearly full race (at least 40k) at 20%, a shortened race (a la 2007) at 20% and a cancellation at 10%. In the past 24 hours, with a surprise coating of snow, I’d move the numbers to 70-10-10-10. It’s amazing what a couple inches of snow will do.

Finally, the past 24 hours’ model runs show the following conditions for race time. You can see there’s some volatility:

• 10, cloudy, north winds, possible light snow, new snow before race day
• 20, calm, clear, new wet snow before race day
• 30, east wind, damp, new wet snow before race day
• 15, north wind, mostly cloudy, some new snow before race day