© Apex Mountain Resort InstagramApex Mountain Resort sees most snow in 40-plus years.
"You're skiing in this kind of weightless powder zone, the snow is blowing up over your shoulders, it truly is what you live for as a skier or snowboarder," Shalman, Apex general manager, said from the top of the hill Friday.
Apex Mountain has smashed through snowfall records this week, seeing over 150 centimetres in the last four days, and it's still coming down.
"We just happen to be in this little storm cell, and it just hit us, in a great way," Shalman said.
He has been at Apex for 20 years and can't recall a bigger, longer-lasting dump of snow, and he's been talking to locals in the lift lines whose memories stretch even further.
"They don't know if we've seen [a storm cycle this big] ever up here, and if we have it's been 40-plus years."
Over Wednesday and Thursday, Shalman says they did a little research and discovered Apex saw the most snowfall in all of North America during that 48-hour period.
Word has gotten out, and the resort is seeing visitors from Revelstoke, Vancouver, Seattle and more, all suffering from powder fever.
"Almost everyone that I talked to in the lift line is like "Forget sick days and work and all that," Shalman said with a laugh.
The big week is especially sweet for Shalman considering what a difficult season the resort had in 2019. Lack of snowfall limited what runs could be open throughout the season, and attendance was down.
"Last year was just not the best. We came off five or six really big snow years prior to that, so people were kind of like 'What the heck is this?'" Shalman said.
"We've had a really good snow year already but this is taking it to the next level. With two months still to go, this is probably going to end up being one of our best years on record, I'm guessing."
Apex expects more snowfall overnight Friday and through Saturday, with skies clearing up Sunday.
The river down the hill from my house has 10-foot banks. It's over them and the trail and farmland surrounding it look like a lake as far as you can see. Haven't seen it this bad since 2009, when a small town on a hill to the east of us was completely cut off and became an island, accessible only by boat. Seattle's annual rainfall is ~37.5 inches; we've had 16 since Jan 1.
None of this is as bad as many places, however, the biggest problem here is the lack of light. It has been completely and thickly overcast without more than a few hours' partial sun since well before Thanksgiving. I sometimes think that if we ever get to see the stars again here, people will have the same reaction as the people in Asimov's "Nightfall" and go crazy!