It's the 3rd night in a row of a poor refreeze in the Park City, Provo, and Ogden area mountains below about 8500'. To be sure, clear skies will foster a superficial refreeze due to long-wave radiational cooling, but it'll be a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing. Many areas are still transitioning from a winter to spring snowpack...and can tend to produce wet slides while the plumbing and piping sorts its self out in the snowpack to allow for the free water to work its way out and not pool along layers and interfaces.

A spike in water flow is forecasted for some streams by the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center. (They are co-located with us at the National Weather Service downtown.) Mark Saurer, part of the Park City Mountain Resort snow safety, put together one of the more interesting research papers in awhile and presented his findings last September in Anchorage. He was looking at the correlation between forecasted spikes in water flows along the creeks and drainages with wet avalanche activity in the mountains.

While the temperatures are roughly the same, I'm expecting more insolation - that is more energy added to the snowpack over time due to less cloud cover and more sun. This translates to more melting and free water. At a certain point, a little water is ok, a lot is not. Take two plastic cards, dampen the interface between them and voile! they stick together. Now try a gallon and yep, it's just a mess. Much the same with the snowpack.

To be sure, our first significant wet cycle of the year occurred on the 14th/15th of this month and I'm not forecasting another cycle; still, wet snow forecasting confidence has a lot to be desired. The idea is by noting little weather parameters from home and then ground truthing them from the field and making simple observations you tend to stack the odds in your favor. Yellow flags -

• If you're sinking in past your boot tops or augering in with your sled
• Can you easily punch your ski pole or probe to the ground - or worse yet, stepping off your ski/board/sled and punch through to the ground into wet snow
• Are you able to easily get wet snow to sluff with little effort on moderate to steep slopes?

Bottom line is to get off of and out from underneath steeper sunny slopes by the time they've become wet, unconsolidated and unstable. Avoid being in or above steep walled gullies or other terrain traps that funnel snow into deeper piles of wet cement.

Glide avalanches and cornice failure become increasingly likely in the spring. Notorious glide avalanche terrain includes Stairs Gulch, Broads Fork and Mill B South of Big Cottonwood Canyon and have resulted in a double fatality in - I believe - spring of '99 in Stairs Gulch and a significant accident and broken leg earlier this year (in Broads Fork). Check out Glide Avalanches in our Encyclopedia and watch the avalanche rip-out.