If you look at avalanche advisories other English-speaking countries like Canada and New Zealand, they will look similar to our advisory. Most elements of this look actually started in Utah and spread to many other parts of the world and evolved in the process. Now, it's our turn to match the look that other countries have gravitated towards. In the summer of 2012, many of the U.S. avalanche centers in our region met to negotiate a common look including Wyoming, Idaho California and Colorado. Eventually, you should see these areas adopt the same look and menu …

I stopped to look at the snow, and when I was done with my test pit I turned around to see that Otto's pit was just as big and as deep as mine. Unfortunately, he also found weak faceted or sugary snow in his pit. The base layer dosen't look all that good anymore, and a forecast week of high pressure isn't going to help things much. Otto's pit clearly shows a fairly weak shallow snowpack plagued by sugary faceted snow. The weakest snow is the top few inches comprised of grapple and newly formed small-grained facets called …

When I head out for a field day, I've always got a "hit list" - it's bad snow I'm looking for, always looking for the worstsnow there is.People don't trigger avalanches where thestrong snow is,they trigger them from the weak spots. So it's a very focused,detective work,trying to discover where theworst snow is hiding.In SWAG(Snow, Weather and Avalanche Guidelines) this is known as "targeted site selection", and I'm doing test profiles - collecting the type and amount of information that I want. I often walk away from a snow pit I've started digging when I realize I'm not …

A few people have suggested that I condense my Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop presentation from early November into an article. There are very few well documented cases of dry snow avalanches being triggered by warming. What you see below will also be in this spring's periodical of the American Avalanche Association,The Avalanche Review. Synopsis - Case study of Sunday March 4, 2012. All the natural and human triggered slides that stemmed from Heat/Solar Radiationinduced deformation on a conditionally unstable snowpack. A powerful Pacific storm shook the Wasatch over …

With only 8 inches of total snow on the stake at the Tony Grove Snotel, backcountry snow conditions are obviously shallow. Even so, you can find slopes at the highest elevations with smooth underlying ground and enough snow for a bit of early season fun. We found a few pockets of skiable terrain today on Cornice Ridge, west of and above Tony Grove Lake. Only north facing slopes above around 8500 feet in elevation have enough snow, since snow from October survived only on upper elevation shady slopes. Unlike our lucky southern neighbors in the Central Wasatch Range who …

Well, I just wrapped up the second of two very good powder days. The first I spent with my colleague Drew and we both agreed that after last year, we both really needed to take a day off and have a day full of low density, in your face snow. We have been skiing and snowboarding some steep terrain with no avalanche problems. But wait!! Hasn't the avalanche danger been CONSIDERABLE?!! Yes it has. However, this does not apply to all of the terrain out there and you need to read and digest more to understand how to get good …

Last February, at a TED (Technology, Education, Design) conference in California, a PhD student named Lior Zoref brought an ox onstage to perform a social experiment. He had each person in the crowd write down what (s)he thought the animal weighed and turn it in. While his assistants were tabulating the answers, he then went on to talk about the wisdom of crowds. James Surowiecki posed the same argument in his 2004 bookThe Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Its central theme …