For a moment, everything for the Birkie looked … fine. The models had coalesced south, it looked like snow for the Birkie, even for the open track (for the most part).

Then the models ingested some new data.

Now it looks … more interesting.

Wednesday morning looks like a half inch of the R word. Sorry open track skiers. If you didn’t enjoy last year’s 0˚ windfest, you’ll get 0˚ this year, just in a different measurement system. The rain will mostly fall just above freezing so it probably won’t impact the snowpack too much, but it will make for a hard, sloppy mess. This feels a lot like 2016, except instead of the race taking place on the warm snowpack just after the rain (it never really froze the night before, and I hate to think how many fluoros were rubbed off of skis that year) it’s taking place three days later. This will allow plenty of time to freeze down the snow, hopefully add some new snow to the top to groom in, and for the Birkie to go out and patch anything which needs to be patched up. It may wind up being a very fast Birkie, given all of the transformed snow we’ll be skiing on, and may actually hold up quite well for late waves since it should be frozen solid.

It also means if the Birkie tells you to stay off the trail, stay off the trail!