CARRABASSETT VALLEY — Friday the 13th brought some weird weather to Sugarloaf, including thunder and lightning that forced the ski resort to shut down its lifts earlier than normal.
“Skiing was great until about 12:30,” spokesman Ethan Austin said at 3:30 p.m.
“It’s snowing right now, but we’ve had a little bit of everything all day. We’ve had rain, freezing rain, sleet, hail and snow, so it’s been a wild weather day, for sure.”
At about 12:15 p.m., the resort stopped its lifts when the first bit of thunder and lightning rolled through, he said.
Ski lift towers and steel line strung alongside a mountain can attract lightning strikes.
“We initially just put them on hold temporarily and we actually did reopen several of them about an hour later,” Austin said.
“In that period of an hour, we hadn’t had any thunder or lightning and the radar looked fairly clear, so we reopened some of them and about probably 20 minutes after that, we had another rumble of thunder, so we put them all on hold.”
Then, about half an hour later, “we decided that we’d just keep them closed for the rest of the day just to be safe,” he said.
Lightning storms in the winter at the Carrabassett Valley ski hill are “really rare,” Austin said.
“This is my seventh winter up here and I can recall maybe two or three days in the last seven years where we’ve had a rumble of thunder in the winter and usually, it’s just one and done, and then we can reopen,” he said.
Snowstorms that pack lightning are referred to as “thundersnow,” but Friday’s ran the precipitation gamut at Sugarloaf.
James Brown, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, said winter thunderstorms are the same as summer thunderstorms. They’re just not as frequent.
“You just have to have ice and water in a cloud so that you have a positive and a negative charge,” Brown said.
He likened the phenomenon to a cold front colliding with a warm front during the summer. Except on Friday, it was an Arctic blast zipping down from Canada that collided with warmer air moving out of the state, creating a large enough contrast in temperatures to spawn lightning.
“It’s not common, but it does happen just about every winter, somewhere, especially when you get a very strong surge of cold air about to move in,” Brown said.
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