Remember the Birkie a year ago? It was pretty nice, with lots of snow.

Remember a month before the Birkie? It was a bit dicier. January had been a mess of freeze-thaw cycles and the trail finally built up some base later in the month, but things were dicier in mid-January. There had been three days in the 40s and the base only built up later in the month.

This year? It’s been darned-near perfect. The one day that topped 32 did so for eight hours; not enough to harm the base. About two feet of snow graces the trail, and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, at least in the next couple of weeks. (That’s a live link to the current GFS model for 16 days—half the time until the Birkie—and it shows a high of 25, a low of -25 and 6-12 inches of snow.) This isn’t any official weather speculation quite yet (I might tag it as such, though), but barring a catastrophe, we’re in pretty darned good shape.