Photo by Adam Lapierre

By ADAM LAPIERRE
News staff writer

“Get it while you can”: It’s a motto that holds true for countless situations, and a strategy that works especially well for taking full advantage of the variable ski/snowboard seasons Mount Hood gives us each year.

For the powder snobs, the week-kneed and those who aren’t fortunate enough to have a season pass at one of the local resorts, a few words are changed, and the slogan turns into, “Get it while the getting’s good.”

Either way, for the middle of November, people of both philosophies are pretty happy.

The early-season crowd got its kicks way earlier than usual this year, and with a good solid base on the ground, Mt. Hood Meadows’ Nov. 11 opening came without much of the typical rocks and stumpage that seem to attract skis and boards like magnets do metal.

One of the earliest openings in Meadows’ history; a 50-inch base already and more snow in the seven-day forecast … knock on wood. Seriously, knuckles to lumber, and if you’re not superstitious, do it for those of us who are.

With such a good early start to the season, one can’t help but wonder how the rest of it will pan out.

After poking around the Internet, it seems that, early on, many experts predicted a “El Niño” winter for the region, which generally means warmer and drier than normal conditions for the Pacific Northwest.

Closer to the start of the season,  however, members of the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society met in Portland for the annual “What will winter be like?” conference. For all the powder hounds out there, the news was pretty much all good.

Here are some of the highlights:

“The strong El Niño conditions have faded and more ‘neutral’ conditions are now present. Most climate forecasters agree that conditions are expected to remain in the ‘neutral’ (neither La Niña nor El Niño) range for this winter.”

“Unfortunately, neutral winters are the toughest to predict because they can feature quite a bit of variety,” wrote Drew Jackson, meteorologist for Fox 12 Oregon on his Travel Oregon blog. “In summary, it seems doubtful that a bummer snow year is headed our way. Instead, all indications are that we’ll again be blessed with plentiful snow.”

One method of winter prediction that some forecasters use is the “analog forecasting method,” which compares current and recent conditions of the atmosphere and ocean with past seasons that started with similar conditions. It then offers predictions based on how those seasons turned out.

“All of the analog years feature big snow years,” Jackson said. “And most of the forecasters agreed that this winter is likely to have at least an average amount of snow, with the scale tipped toward above-average snowfall.”

The time-trusted Farmer’s Almanac has a similar outlook for the region:

“Winter temperatures and precipitation will be near normal, on average, with above-normal snowfall,” the Almanac’s annual weather summary stated. “The coldest periods will occur in early to mid- and late December, mid-January and early to mid-February, with the snowiest periods in mid-December, early January and mid-February.”