Join the Utah Avalanche Center TOMORROW! Saturday, February 12th at the
Brighton Beacon Bash hosted by Weston Backcountry, Utah Mountain Adventures, Black Diamond, and Ortovox. There will be FREE ski and splitboard demos, avalanche rescue gear demos and a LIVE mock avalanche rescue.
Skies are partly cloudy.
Mountain temperatures are in the low to mid-20s.
If it's not going to snow, at least at it can be windy, at least up high. In the screen capture below, you can see the west-northwesterly gusts straining toward 100mph overnight at the 11,000' level.
The more representative anemometers have hourly averages of 15-20mph with gusts to 30.
For today, we'll have mostly sunny skies, moderate northwest winds and temperatures again soaring into the upper 30s. High pressure will continue its stranglehold on Utah through the weekend. A Pacific storm slated for Tuesday still looks like it will shear apart, but there is a hint of another wave piggy-backing the northern branch of the storm that may actually produce a couple inches of snow. We'll see.
Thanks to stormy October and Decembers, coverage remains good and winter backcountry travel is easy. Wind and sun crusts abound, but softening corn-like conditions exist on solar aspects and a few soft turns can be found in sheltered northerly terrain. Mark and his partners enjoyed perfect and glorious weather down on Mt Nebo yesterday and his observation can be found
HERE>.
One of my colleagues running the snow safety program at one of the ski areas along the Park City ridgeline closed off some of his solar low/mid elevation terrain yesterday, noting that "the shallow snowpack did not take the heat well." With collapsing of the wet snowpack and minor wet loose activity, it was time to pull the plug. Good rule of thumb for those traveling in sunny terrain today.
Greg Gagne's Week in Review is published and can be found
HERE>
