Thanks to the generous support of our local resorts and Ski Utah, discount lift tickets are now available. Support the UAC while you ski at the resorts this season. Tickets are available
here.We're getting traced to death. Most areas picked up yet another trace of snow overnight. We might see yet another trace of snow this morning.
In the central Wasatch, I generally look at 20-25 weather stations in the morning and none of them are above zero. Many of them are -5°F or below. Winds are a little gusty (30-35mph gusts at 11k) from the west northwest with a little ripple (I hesitate to call it a 'storm') moving through this morning, but northwest winds should be 10-15mph for the day. At most.
Look for clearing skies by midday, light northwest winds, and temperatures that struggle into the single digits up high, the low teens down low.
The Alta Guard has been keeping monthly snow numbers since 1944/1945. January snow totals were 21" and 4.07" snow water equivalent. Average for January is 91"/8.6"SWE. Year to date numbers are 184"/21.22"SWE.
There is a beautiful book, written by the French aviator Antoine de St. Exupéry, called Wind, Sand, and Stars. Part of it details a time when his plane crashed in the Libyan desert. I think it was 1935. With little water between them, it wasn’t long until he and his navigator began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations. Mirages appeared on the landscape, though they were always just out of reach. It’s a little like looking at the weather models these days…
No new avalanches were reported yesterday, but two avalanches of interest have been reported in the last week:
- Monday there was one report of a small human-triggered soft slab of wind drifted snow in Upper Lambs Canyon. This avalanche was on an east aspect on a 32° slope at 8,700' on a heavily wind-loaded slope, no one was caught or carried.
- On Sunday, a catch-and-carry on the Catcher's Mitt on Kessler where a skier triggered a sluff in the weak surface snow on a steep, 40° slope. The skier was briefly caught and carried over a 10' cliff band and fortunately stopped short before going over a 30' cliff. I encourage you to read through this honest, well-described account of how getting caught in a small avalanche can be consequential in steep terrain.
