Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop 2015 - October 31, 2015 The Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop (USAW) was yet another smashing success with over 600 attendees and 29 commercial exhibits. Each year, USAW provides critical, continuing education for both professionals and the public with attendees and presenters from across the Intermountain West. The chief organizer and MC, Craig Gordon, wore his usual tuxedo, combined with the energy that only Craig can deliver. Because USAW evolved from being a continuing education seminar just for professionals, it features talks …

It's thattime of year when everyone asks me, "What kind of winter are we going to have." I always give the same answer: "We will get what we get. If anyonecould reliably forecast long term weather, theycould be fabulously wealthy." "But this is a big El Nino year. It's supposed to be HUGE!" "Nope," I reply, "Neither El Nino nor La Nina have any correlation to northern Utah because we are on the boundary between the two regimes. It's supposed to be wet to the south of us and dry to the north of us. Here,we'll just get what we get." "But the Farmer's Almanac …

Mark Staples, new Director of the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center I’m excited by the choice of Mark Staples as the new Director of the Forest Service side of the Utah Avalanche Center. (The UAC is a Forest Service – nonprofit partnership.) Mark will replace me as Director; I retired from the Forest Service August28th and Mark was selected in mid August from a field of very qualified candidates. And yes, I was very relieved to not be on the selection committee since I know all of the top candidates quite well. Mark comes to us by way of Bozeman, …

Here is the Annual Report for 2014-15. Click on the attachment for the complete report. In short, the unprecedented 2014-15 season smashed all previous records for the least amount of snow and the warmest temperatures since records began at Alta in the 1940’s. The previous record for the least amount of snow at the Alta Guard Station was 314 inches in the infamous 1976-77 season. This season only 267.5 inches fell from November 1st through April 30th. But the good news…Utah had only one fatality instead of the average of four. We had 116 unintentional, …

Year to Date I've been keeping an eye on the year to date snowfall at the Alta Guard for this season and it looks like we are well on our way to breaking a record for the all time lowest amount. Records date back to 1945 at the Alta Guard. Let's take a look at where we are. Here are the monthly totals (in inches) as of Saturday, March 14 along with the monthly averages: Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr Total 2014-15 59.5 73.5 28.5 35 17 213.5 Average 70 92 94 83 90 68 499 March …

The percent of normal for March 1st for the western U.S. As you can see, we are doing much better than the West Coast but we're still around half ofnormal. Here is a series of plots for various SNOTEL sites in the Wasatch. I plottedthe average (blue), the lowest year on record (red) and this season (green.) The lower elevation SNOTELsites have much less snow than the lowest snow year on record. The higher elevation plots are about tied for the record low. So even though Utah has about half or normal for the season, we are still close to a record low, which speaks …

Riders triggered over a dozen sizable avalanches in the Tony Grove Area midweek February 4 and 5, and once again a couple people were probably pretty dang lucky in the Logan Zone. Although impressive looking slides, two feetdeep and in some cases, wider than a football field, these were soft, slow-running, and as it turns out, rather user-friendly avalanches. Practicing avalanche rescue in a nice sled triggered avalanche in the Tony Grove Area on 2-7-2015 Skilled riders might've outrun these avalanches, and no one got hurt this time, butfuture avalanches on the …