Currently-
Under mostly cloudy skies, light snow falls, adding a few more flakes to the couple of inches of snow that stacked up late Sunday. Temperatures are in the single digits and low teens. West and southwest winds created headline news across the range early this morning, bumping into the 40's, 50's, and even 60's along the high peaks. This mornings powder punishing winds damaged our big open bowls and high alpine terrain. But lose a little elevation, head to wind sheltered slopes and you'll be rewarded with soft, surfy snow. The range has excellent early season coverage with total snow depths averaging close to 4' of settled snow.
Above is a 24 hour run from Windy Peak, illustrating a bump in this mornings ridgetop winds.
Uinta weather network info is found here. Simply click on the Western Uinta tab.
For today-
Snow winds down quickly this morning as last nights weak storm system departs to the east. Winds should remain strong this morning, shifting to the west-northwest after sunrise, and then taper off through the day as high pressure builds in this afternoon.
Futurecast-
A weakening storm brings the next chance for snow on Wednesday. And then it looks like a stormy period is on track for the last half of the work week.
A few days old, but significant none-the-less. On Friday, a group of riders triggered a large avalanche, on a very steep, heavily wind loaded, upper elevation, southeast facing slope near Strawberry Reservoir. Reported as 5' deep and 800' wide and failing on weak snow near the ground, this large slide broke as the rider was climbing the slope. Fortunately he was about 20 feet from the crownline, grabbed some throttle, and was able to punch it to the ridge, narrowly escaping the slide. The big heads up here is... this is a sunny slope, where we generally head to when there's elevated avy danger, expecting to avoid weak snow issues usually found on shady slopes. However, strong northwesterly winds last week, coupled with nearly a foot of midweek storm snow helped connect this very stout slab. And this all rests on lower density snow from the Christmas storm.... strong snow on weak snow. All we need to do is roll along and knock the legs out from underneath. Stoked everyone is OK and deeply appreciate the great reporting from this crew of riders!
To view additional trip reports and recent avalanche activity, simply click
here. 
