Resort touts deepest snow in state
Paul Kozuch finds plenty of fresh powder while skiing Tuesday at Whitefish Mountain Resort. The ski area has the deepest snowpack in the state. (Rhyan McLaury photo)
January has delivered the goods to Northwest Montana’s mountains.
As of Tuesday, Whitefish Mountain Resort boasted the deepest snowpack in the state following a week of seemingly nonstop snowfall. The snow depth at the summit of Big Mountain registered at 111 inches on Jan. 14, the deepest for the date since 1997, according to statistics kept by the resort.
Total snowfall this season is already at 155 inches, which is ahead of the pace from 2017-18 when the resort tallied 410 inches for the season — a banner winter.
The mountain has tallied about 5 1/2 feet of new snow since Dec. 31.
“We started off the season slowly, but we’re definitely feeling good so far this month,” resort spokesperson Riley Polumbus said.
“A lot of it has been a lighter and drier powder with the cold temperatures,” she added.
The resort is now 100 percent open.
Blacktail Mountain Ski Area above Lakeside also touts a strong snowpack, with 40 inches reported at the summit on Jan. 12, while Turner Mountain near Libby reported a base depth of 48 inches.
According to data collected by Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Flathead Basin snowpack is at 118 percent of average for this time of year. The Kootenai Basin is at 111 percent of average.
That’s a substantial turnaround from earlier in the winter, according to Lucas Zukiewicz, NRCS water supply specialist for Montana.
“While the eastern half of the state received above normal precipitation, the mountains were largely left high and dry,” Zukiewicz noted in a media release.
The large-scale dry weather patterns over Western Montana remained the same throughout most of December, he added. It wasn’t until the last week of December that the patterned shifted, when an “atmospheric river” pointed squarely at the northwest corner of the state provided abundant moisture along the Canadian border in Northwest Montana.
The onslaught of snow is expected to continue, with mountain snow showers likely every day through the weekend. A ridge of high pressure could build over the Northern Rockies for the first part of next week before yet another active weather pattern sets in, the National Weather Service in Missoula reports.