SNOTEL

Cruising by the Rabbit Ears SNOTEL this morning...

Nosy Rudy must nosily check out every and any thing we pass :)
Cool Jack is merely cruising on by.

A SNOTEL you ask? Yes the Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) network is composed of over 900 automated data collection sites located in remote, high-elevation mountain watersheds in the western U.S. They are used to monitor snowpack, precipitation, temperature, and other climatic conditions. As a skijor team, our main interest in the SNOTELs is the snowpack reporting. This morning the Rabbit Ears SNOTEL was reporting 65 inches of snowpack. For fun, we decided to go cruise by the SNOTEL and see the snowpack for ourselves. As you see above, yes indeed there is over 5 feet of snowpack on Rabbit Ears!

Once we verified the snowpack, it was time to test if the spring crust over all this snow was firm enough to support our weight.

Yep, a super firm spring crust. Yay!

With the snowpack and crust verified, it was time to do our favorite Spring activity: abandon set trails and zoom every which way on the solid crust. Jack & Rudy were in a real running groove!

The hover husking catching air on the perfect crust.

Rudy is an absolute beautiful running machine. Jack is no slouch, but Rudy is beautiful and is rarely touching the ground :)

Rudy the flying reindeer alongside fast but not flying Jack.

Temperatures were in the low 20s (F) when we started the outing and increasing as we went along. I knew the kids were going to roll snow angels to cool off when we paused. I didn't know they were going to roll perfectly synchronized snow angels :)

I give that a score of '10' on the synchronized snow angel scorecard.

Do Jack & Rudy get tired on our outings? Ha, no. While they sleep nicely once home, they are full throttle  the entire outing. Come along for the last 75 seconds of this morning's skijor. Can you tell the impressive kids have already run 9 miles by this point? 

[watch on youtube if no video loads below]

Finally, today's end of run treat snow wall was quite impressive too. 

This might the the tallest snow wall they've been on this season to get
end of run treats!

Beautiful morning playing around the Rabbit Ears SNOTEL on the perfect spring crust: 9.2 miles traveled with 700 feet of elevation climbed and a top speed of 22 MPH.

2022/2023 Season to Date: 145 days on the trails covering 1286.8 miles with 117,800 feet of elevation climbed.