While I was eating lunch, snow showers moved back in, and when I started skiing again after lunch, I noticed a heavy snow shower approaching from the north as I skied along the ridge at the top of the ski area, headed back again to that same run. By the time I was halfway down, the snow was coming down like crazy - you couldn't see to the bottom of the run and could barely see across it:
In the second picture above, the trees nearly hidden by the snow are only a couple hundred feet away. Just after I took these pictures and started down again, there was a long rumble of thunder, quite loud for a few moments in the middle of the rumble, that seemed to be coming from just to my north. Wish I had been taking video, but I wasn't really expecting the thunder until it happened. Probably should have, given the intensity of the snow. There was another more distant rumble a few minutes later, then no more. This squall dropped about an inch of snow in less than an hour. Shortly after the thundersnow, I called it quits for the day, mostly because I was tired but also because I did not want to be on the chairlift if there was a chance of lightning. But there was no more, and they kept the lifts running. On the way back to Santa Fe, I got this shot of the squalls over the mountain to my eastL
The squalls continued to move south along the ridge of the Sangre de Cristos, producing heavy snow in the late afternoon at Ski Santa Fe. In the picture above, the convective nature of the snow squalls is evident.