All the major ski and snowboard areas in the local mountains are now open in some fashion or another.
Bear Mountain in Big Bear opened some terrain on Saturday, but Mountain High Resort in Wrightwood gets honors for being the first area open top to bottom on Wednesday. Bear's big sister, Snow Summit, opened today and Snow Valley Mountain Resort is also humming.
During normal weather patterns (anyone remember those?), these resorts would have opened by mid-November. There have even been times when chair lifts are running by Halloween. But the right combination of weather factors had not been present to allow for significant snowmaking until recent weeks.
No matter how warm it is down here in the flats, two things have helped kick snowmaking back into gear: high winds and freezing overnight temps in the San Berdoo Mountains.
So go wax those boards and sticks!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.