SEATTLE - A series of storms has blanketed Washington's Cascade Range with deeper November snow than ski areas have seen in years, drawing crowds to the slopes earlier than usual.

Officials at the Mount Baker ski area in the northwestern corner of the state said Friday it had gotten 70 inches of snow in four days, boosting its base depth to 94 inches - the deepest at any ski area in North America, according to SnoCountry Mountain Reports, a snow conditions reporting service based in Lebanon, N.H.

AP

Mount Baker and Crystal Mountain were the first to open for the season in Washington State.

"This is a tremendous amount of snow for this time of year," spokeswoman Gwyn Howat raved on her cell phone as she rode a lift up the mountain. "In the last 15 years, it's probably only happened a couple times. What's very special about this snow right now is that it's falling at very cold temperatures, so it's just fantastic conditions."

Most ski areas in the Northwest tend to open near the end of November or in early December. Last year, several opened in early November, though with much less snow than they've started out with this year.

Mount Baker and Crystal Mountain, east of Mount Rainier, were the first to open for the season on Nov. 16. Stevens Pass, about 80 miles northeast of Seattle, opened the following day.

Closer to Seattle, The Summit at Snoqualmie opened some of the lifts on its western slopes last Saturday, had to shut down for a couple days, then reopened Wednesday.

White Pass also opened last weekend, then closed for most of the week before opening back up on Friday.

"We literally couldn't have better powder skiing than we have today," White Pass spokeswoman Kathleen Goyette said Friday. "We picked up three feet of new snow. ... We're just thrilled that this storm came in."

Snoqualmie Pass got so much snow that the state Department of Transportation closed a section of Interstate 90 east of Snoqualmie Pass for avalanche control work early Friday afternoon. The highway reopened about 20 minutes later.

Two men in a pickup died on I-90 Friday morning when a tree fell onto the highway and hit the truck as it was traveling eastbound about 12 miles east of the Snoqualmie Pass summit. It was not immediately known what caused the tree to fall.

Depending on the location, anywhere from one to two feet of snow had fallen in the Cascades from early Thursday through Friday afternoon, said Gary Schneider, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service's Seattle office.

Snowfall throughout the region started to lighten up Friday morning and was expected fall periodically throughout the weekend, though not as heavily as in recent days, Schneider said.

The forecast called for weekend temperatures to dip low enough that snow was possible even at sea level across Western Washington.

"There is a chance for snow over the lowlands starting Saturday evening, continuing into Sunday," Schneider said. "At this point, it's really hard to say whether we're going to get it or how much, but there's definitely a chance."

More than 10,000 runners expected to tackle the Seattle Marathon on Sunday were probably hoping that chance is slim.