A half-century ago, we were just beginning to work with the technology that allowed snow pillows to report their data remotely. Stahl was then a clockwork device that recorded snow-water equivalents on a chart – we’d open the case, roll up the chart, put a rubber band around it and send it off to Phil Farnes at the end of a week measuring snow.
Now, as a much older man, and a private citizen, I can call on the station at https://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/snow/snowplot.cgi?STAM8 and get the information on my screen. There is a lot of change in fifty years.
As you can see by the graph, in a year when Stahl Peak snow measurements stayed remarkably close to the average, with May, the snow melt has rapidly increased – the end of the black line is at 86% of average.
The chart from Grave Creek shows that, with the first of May, the snow pillow was free of snow, earlier than normal:
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