If you’re an avid skier or snowboarder, this might be a good weekend to stay home and stream a Warren Miller movie.
The impending cold snap that has the Front Range bracing for brutal temperatures also will deliver numbing cold with frostbite potential in the high country, especially in the northern mountains near the Continental Divide, according to the OpenSnow forecasting and reporting service.
For many of those resorts, Saturday high temperatures in single digits are forecast to occur at midnight, followed by daytime temperatures falling near or below zero.
Resorts with below-zero temperatures during the ski day will include Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Copper Mountain. Temperatures of 1 to 5 degrees above zero during the ski day are forecast for Winter Park, Vail, Beaver Creek Steamboat, Keystone, Eldora and Breckenridge.
The nights at these resorts could fall as far as -10 below zero.
It is unlikely that any resorts will close due to the cold, though. Sometimes resorts close due to high winds, and they occasionally shut down upper lifts on cold weather days, especially those above timberline.
More temperatures near zero — above or below — are forecast for daytime Sunday.
For most of those areas, snowfall will be minimal, according to Joel Gratz, founding meteorologist at OpenSnow.
“The snow will start in the northern part of Colorado on Friday night and progress to the southern border and out of Colorado by Saturday evening,” Gratz wrote in his Thursday morning outlook. “Snow accumulations will be deepest just east of the northern divide with 5-10 inches, and other mountain areas will likely see just 1-5 inches.”