In Seattle, the leaves have turned and fallen and disappeared. The winter clouds have taken up their low residence in the green ups and downs of the city. Everyone has given thanks around a table of family and friends by now. UT beat A&M. Latte sales are approaching their seasonal zenith; a fever pitch of drizzly caffeine is in full swing. And yet something is missing. It should be ski season by now in the Upper Left, but it is not. An atmospheric current, called the Pineapple Express, abnormally warmed by the ocean has soaked up an equally abnormal amount of moisture, which collides with the lower pressure, cold air in the mountains and condenses to create yet even more abnormal Seattle rain (which is falling in a very normal, mist-like sprinkle manner). A historic downpour of sorts, by some counts. For the past two weeks, throughout the mountains, all of the rain collects in the Snohomish and Snoqualmie and Skykomish, flooding waterfalls and many residential areas. None of it is freezing. And despite a promising early freeze & base, Crystal Mountain remains remarkably unski-able well into December, the resort’s online presence marred with a cruel header declaring the lack of snow and inviting you to check the forecast. See for yourself, it taunts. Maybe it will be different since you checked this morning. But day after day, the opening day recedes into the abyss of the Holiday season. I’m not sure I’ll be around to see it. I’m not even sure 2025 will see an opening day.
The dirt visible at the top of Crystal Mountain is made only worse by the knowledge that 2025 is a La Niña year, a season of higher concentration of water in the air floating above the Pacific Northwest delivered from the balmy surf in the equatorial Pacific. If it were cold enough, it would provide a substantial base of snow. But instead it provisions only substantial portions of grief and sorrow. Snoqualmie, the local bowling alley of ski resorts and also one of the best value ski resorts remaining in corporatized America, would almost be comical if my resulting winter hardship wasn’t so serious.
So yeah, there’s no snow in the mountains, if you were wondering. I found myself wondering how normal this was, considering the atmospheric conditions are reportedly so strange this winter. And, of course, considering the global collective is currently on target to scream past 2050 IPCC 1.5 ºC targets at Mach 3. When refreshing the Crystal website for the 27th time at work the other day, I found myself poking around in corners of the site untold, searching desperately for a crumb of a clue, a modicum of commitment by the resort or God or whoever to a ski season by a certain date. Instead, I found a list of the historic opening dates dating back to 1969, the year of our holy moon landing. 1969 must have been a great year, because you could have gone to Woodstock in New York and started a cross country drive to Seattle to ski, arriving just in time to start skiing on Crystal’s opening day of November 21st, 1969. We used to have culture in this country. November 21st! What were the other years on record like? With the help of a friend, I ran the numbers.
While Crystal is great for making the data available, they also keep somewhat questionable records. Since 1969, we have complete knowledge of Open & Close dates for 43 (about 75%) of the years. I can only conclude the other years were just so sick that everyone was too busy shredding to write anything at all down, so right off the bat we are working with a handicapped dataset.
On the bright side, the duration (read, Season Duration) is on average longer than 5 months and is trending longer by almost 1 day per season! Huge.
Below, observe the glorious upward trend in Crystal power. Note the abnormally long 1971 season and drop off after that. Blame Jimmy Carter!
What’s the duration skew, the more astute observers will inquire. Good question. It's got a longer right tail, but it’s pretty tight. The Crystal season is usually about 150 days long.
Let’s look at that in a way that makes a bit more sense - below is the Season timeline. Yellow is for longer seasons - the darker, the shorter the ski season.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but the key insight we are trying to generate here is when the powder will be arriving and how down bad we are compared to our ancestors.
A closer look at this reveals that usually, Crystal has been open for weeks by the beginning of December. The numbers don’t lie, we are getting fleeced. tHowever, it could be worse. Day 356 is December 22, 2014. And one year in the 80’s, Crystal opened so late that the algorithm thinks it opened historically early! Jan 10. Yeesh.
We can take a closer look at Crystal Opening dates here
In the spirit of being predictive and pedantic, because I am certainly not busy skiing, I also took a look at how Crystal Seasons correlated with weather stats. I pulled data from two nearby weather stations - good data is unfortunately unavailable from the bottom of Rainier, where Crystal sits.
Lets see how this all correlates with our ski season in the PNW.
Looks like Opening day has basically no predictive power on season duration. Nice. The season is all about when Crystal decides to shut it down. Of course, temperature min and max are highly correlated, and inversely correlated with snowfall. It seems like season duration might be slightly predicted by summer temp average, which is great because people are saying that it hit record highs this year. Interestingly, fall precipitation roughly predicts winter snowfall, but I have no idea how tightly winter snowfall correlates with Crystal snowfall. Judging by 0.01 correlation between Season and snowfall, I am going to say there’s a chance that it doesn’t at all.
For fans of cool graphs, here’s a cooler one that shows the data used to generate the above, PLUS Seattle airport representation (so we have both sides of Rainier represented)
I’m not sure what’s up with the negative winter snowfall inches in the bottom right at Yakima.. It’s been raining a lot in Seattle, so I wanted to look at that. There’s basically no trend anywhere although it does look like if it rains a lot or a little in Yakima, there’s always pretty mid duration season in store. See the next plot:
Not sure how much it’s been raining in Yakima, I assumed a lot. Apparently it’s been about average or a little below in 2025.
Let’s zoom in on the season duration and snowfall in Seattle. This one is not super promising
It looks like if it’s snowy in Seattle, it’s likely to be a better year for ski. But it’s almost never snowy Seattle. If it’s raining in Seattle, who knows. It could go either way. But it looks like probably a short season to me.
Here’s a 3D plot because why the hell not.
So overall, in conclusion, who knows what the season will look like. It’s been raining a lot in Seattle, and it's warm, and that’s probably not great except we already knew that because the resort has no friggin’ snow and isn’t currently open. It’s also probably not going to open later than Dec 22 and Jan 11 would be completely unprecedented. I also looked up the weather this week and we are supposed to get snow on Tuesday so go get those planks and boards waxed!