At the first Birkie webinar, they said they really needed about a foot of snow to have a good race. 10 days later, the results are in and Hayward has received 13″. It hasn’t been the thick base-building snow they would have liked, but it’s a foot of snow and it’s been cold, and with 5″ coming yesterday and a bit more during the day today, the Birkie should be in business for a perfect trail.

This is quite impressive given the situation two weeks ago, when the trail had lots of visible grass and dirt. Hayward had seen a total of 6.3″ of snow in all of January after a nearly snowless December (and one which had a warmup at the end which melted anything which would have been there. Here’s a photo from Skinnyski on Jan 26 from Jack Burns:

Here’s Mike Keyes on Jan 18:

It was a bit of a hopeful/gutsy call by the Birkie staff to put their faith in the weather forecast (and, to some extent, climatology) and go with the full course, but we will all be rewarded with a course which, I expect, will bear no resemblance to what it looked like a few weeks before.