Winds started ramping up around midnight and are whipping up a fresh batch of drifts that'll react to our additional weight. Here's where it gets tricky.... yesterdays wind slabs will be hard to detect as they get covered over with today's newly formed drifts. The most important thing to remember is that another storm is on our doorstep and the avalanche hazard is evolving. That said.... you'll find today's drifts more widespread, more connected, and will break deeper than you might expect. As the storm materializes you'll wanna look for and avoid any fat, rounded piece of snow, especially if it sounds hollow like a drum.

We are trending in the right direction and recent snowpack stability tests along with the lack of avalanches failing on weak snow near the ground suggest we're turning the corner. Also streaming in from the good news department is this... most terrain where the snowpack is becoming thick and strong, deep dangerous avalanches are becoming harder to trigger. All encouraging news for sure, but we've got to remember there's a lot of terrain that makes up the landscape of the western Uinta range and I'm not entirely convinced all slopes are good to go. However, our theories will get tested as the next series of storms should add a substantial amount of snow and water and help us determine the strength of our deeply buried weak layers. In the meantime, let's reflect on how persistent weak layers work and remember that all I need to do is find a shallow, weak portion of the snowpack, perhaps around a rock or bush that I can't see underneath the snow, collapse the slope (whoomph), and now I'm staring down the barrel of a dangerous avalanche. What I don't know... where exactly these weak points exist in the snowpack, but steep rocky slopes are certainly high on the suspect terrain list and should be avoided today.