Here’s some news to cool you off if you’re tired of the heat. Tuckerman Ravine, on the Southeast face of Mount Washington, still has snowpack in August.
Well, it did on August 3rd when the picture above was taken of the longest snowboard run in the White Mountains on August 3rd, 2019.
Tuckerman Ravine typically has the last remaining snowpack in the eastern United States during summer.
As such, this is not the latest Tuckerman Ravine has held onto snowpack. MWO says as recently as 1997 that snow remained in this location all the way through summer, but then likely melted before the first snow of early fall.
Research performed at Tuckerman Ravine in the 1960s found that its final snowpack melted, on average, in the first week of August for the years spanning 1922-1958. But MWO says long winters like this past one have become less common, and that data is unavailable on what the average melt out date is now.
Good to know.
I’m curious why they stopped collecting data? I’m also wondering if we can expect the snow to last longer in future years given what we’ve learned about the current solar minimum? We might be seeing more stories like this in the years ahead.
