Unfortunately, the cold powder from the last storm is a thing of the past but what a treat that storm was!! I'd like to take a look back at how things shook out from my perspective. Wednesday, March 20: 4 to 5" of new snow in 24 hours. Mild temperatures to start with a cooling trend. The storm was just starting to get going mid day and produced the high end of the forecast amounts for the day in the upper elevations. Temperatures were mild with the rain/snow line pushing 8000 feet. It was difficult to identify just how the new snow was bonding in areas where it hadn't …

During the Watergate Hearings in August 1974, the pro-Nixon Representative from Indiana, Earl Landgrebe (in)famously retorted "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind's made up." He went on to say "I'm going to stick with my President even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot." The next day Nixon resigned...and a few months later Landgrebewas voted out of office. Beats a lynching or a firing squad I suppose. (Apologies for the lack of apostrophes in the title - the Drupal system didn't 'like' them so much) As an avalanche forecaster, I've always …

The Utah Avalanche Center is a partnership between the Forest Service and the non-profit Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center. A little over a third of the money needed to run the UAC comes from the Forest Service, the State of Utah, and Salt Lake County. The rest comes from events, donations, grants, sponsorships, and classes. Ski Utah and the Utah resorts provide in-kind support and donate lift tickets for us to sell. Snowbird donates office space and Black Diamond sponsors the Fall Fundraising party. Why should this matter to you? If it weren’t for donations …

The Tiny House Tour is sponsored by Outdoor Research. They visited the Wasatch Range and spent time with our own Trent Meisenheimer touring in the backcountry and learning about avalanches. Here is their very cool video they produced. Enjoy: Here are a few thoughts from the crew of the Tiny House Tour: "Every moment in the mountains lends an opportunity to learn. A lifetime education awaits those willing to explore, watch, and listen. And sometimes we meet purveyors of the knowledge, people who have made it their intention to understand the intricacies of the snow, …

This winter I noticed a magazine advertisement for an avalanche airbag pack that claimed “A 97 percent success rate in real world conditions.” What the advertisement didn’t mention was that people caught WITHOUT an avalanche airbag have an 80 - 90 percent success rate. In other words, most people caught in an avalanche will get a cheap lesson; they will either escape off the slab, grab a tree, dig into the bed surface, ride on top of the debris, it will be a small avalanche that wouldn’t burry them anyway, they could be saved by a beacon …

Who was it that said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones." Mark Twain? Rather, Winston Churchill, just after the war, and it's likely he borrowed it from someone else. (Perhaps Twain, again.) I think it's the same with our Avalanche Danger Ratings. At the Black Diamond Fireside Chat a couple weeks ago, I had a surprise for those who showed up. I guessed that most of them had come to learn something from me...but I told them that I was going to turn the tables...and learn something from them. I gave them two …

Risk. Our lives revolve around risk but it’s a concept most of us don’t understand well. The human brain is good at many things such as pattern recognition and the nuances of social interaction but our brain is notoriously poor at statistics and probability. People who are afraid to fly don’t mind driving although, on average, you would have to fly every day for 4,000 years for you to be killed on a commercial aviation flight. Automobile fatalities are so common you hardly see them mentioned in the newspaper anymore (32,000 per year in the U.S.) …