I hope Socal gets some of this before it dries out for Thanksgiving weekend. BTW, welcome to the forum!

Without doubt they do have some decent sized mountains, but it's usually just a couple big mountains off on their own every few dozen miles or so surrounded by some smaller mountains, nothing like the giant and expansive ranges we have. And the lack of mountaineering opportunities around there is vomit inducing for me, there's a couple Chutes and Couloirs on Mt Washington in the winter and that's it. I love the area around Mount Katahdin in mid/northern Maine, but it just doesn't quite do it for me.

Greatest show depth I ever recorded was a bit over 5 feet on Feb 10, 2010, following an epic barrage of snowtorms over a 12 day stretch. Granted, measuring was next to impossible at that point both due to the depth and the fact there were giant ass drifts everywhere, but it was the best estimate I could obtain. The inversion held between storms locally except for 1 day, so I probably only lost ~ 6” to compaction/melting by the time it was done. Jan 29: 7.5” of powder. Cold snow, in the teens. Feb 2/3: 5.2” of wet chowder that clung to everything. Feb 5/6: The great snowmageddon blizzard. Dropped 31” of wet, heavy snow that clung to trees and 40mph winds overnight. Lost power for 2 days as a result of that. You could see transformers lighting up the sky all night long. Feb 9/10: Grand Finale, powerful miller-B blizzard that dropped 20-25”+ in two rounds, with the second found commencing on a surge of NW winds approaching 60mph along with thunder/lightning. Was basically impossible to measure with all the crazy drifts (some 20ft or more) so had to take an average. Was the most dynamic storm I’ve ever experienced and the only true bonafide blizzard I’ve ever experienced. Also the only time the beltway had zero traffic on it since…ever?

Looks like a good forecast for Mount Bachelor, built up a bunch of snow over the last month and there's no worries about it going away. 1-2 weeks of beautiful bluebird days in the mountains, with just as much sun down here with lows in the 10s, sign me up! I have a good feeling about mid-late December, the signaling of retrogression on the models has got me excited for model riding in a week. I think we'll start to consistently see some fun on the forecast by then.