Mt. Bachelor snowpack levels worrisome

Monday marked 60 days until spring, but this week will not feel anything like winter.

Up at Mt. Bachelor, it looks like a lot of snow but that actual numbers may surprise you.

“Usually we see about 10 feet of snow coming over Hoodoo. Unfortunately, this year, not so much,” skier Mike Middleton said.

But that has not slowed down the winter junkies.

“There’s a little bit of fresh, enough in spots. It’s actually really fast,” said another skier, Ron Blaylock.

With nothing but sunshine in the forecast, we won’t be getting new snow for a while.

Actually 2014 was the warmest year on record for the world, and that holds true for Central Oregon as well.

“Turns out that Bend has the warmest year on record in 2014, as well. The average temperature was 48.6 degrees,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Michael Murphy, in Pendleton.

That beats our record set in 2003 of 48.5 degrees, but it does not stop at warm temperatures.

“We have a lot of warm water off the Pacific Coast, just off coast, that tends to amplify the weather pattern,” Murphy said.

The warmer weather pattern does not mean less snow, it just means the freezing levels are higher.

That means more rain.

“Saturday was a rain fest — we should have brought our bathing suits,” Middleton said.

“It was raining on Saturday, yesterday was better, and today’s even better,” said skier Danielle Wallace.

To put it into perspective; at its base, Mt. Bachelor is at less than 50 inches, when it’s usually twice that by this time of year.

That’s a good example for our snowpack percentage overall.

As it stands, we are about 40 to 50 percent of average.

“Sure, could we use some more? Yeah, but it’s not bad,” Middleton said.

At lower elevations, experts say it is bad.

Due to higher freezing levels, the trailhead at Virginia Meisner Sno-Park shows more dirt than snow.

However, the pros say it’s not permanent. Nothing about weather trends really is.

“Going to be kind of the same thing that we’ve been seeing for the past 20 years,” Murphy said. “We have the dry years, the wet years, the cold years, and the warm years.”