When Whistler opened its lifts last week, skiers found record-breaking snow and a resort gearing up for Olympic glory ‘It’s puking snow up here again today,” said Anton Horvath, Whistler’s avalanche forecaster, peering out of his office window on Wednesday last week. “If you took off your skis outside, you would literally sink up to your armpits. I’ve been here for 35 years and I’ve never seen a storm cycle of this intensity in my career.” Skiers love to talk about huge dumps of snow, epic quantities of powder – it’s their equivalent of fishermen’s tales – but what’s happening in Whistler, British Columbia, at the moment really is something special. By Thursday last week, more than 540cm of snow had fallen in November, more than in any month since records began in 1979. To put that into perspective, it’s more than half the snowfall the resort usually expects during the entire winter season, from November to the end of April. It’s already more than Zermatt in Switzerland got during the whole of last season (which was a good one). All that snow, and Whistler’s season is only just beginning. The resort opened fully for the first time on Thursday, when lifts started running on Blackcomb mountain, one of two peaks that make up the resort. The other, Whistler mountain, was opened two weeks early, on 14 November, and since then staff have been fighting a round-the-clock battle to deal with the weather, often literally having to dig lifts out of the snow. “I’d say there’s never too much snow, but it does provide challenges,” said Horvath.

Original Source Whistler: too much snow? No such thing