Yesterday, the northwest wind picked up around 10:00 am, averaging 15-25 mph with gusts into the 20s and 30s throughout the day and night. This morning the wind is still elevated and will remain elevated throughout the day. Because of this, I would expect sensitive drifts of wind blown snow across all mid- and upper elevations. These avalanches will be soft slabs of wind-drifted snow that could be extra sensitive because they either formed over a slick sun crust (sunny side) or our weak and faceted snow surface (shady side). These avalanches could be 1-2 feet deep and large enough to bury a person.

On northerly facing terrain, any avalanche you trigger has the chance of stepping down into deeper weaker layers. Out of the wind, I would look for dry-loose avalanches in all steep terrain. The low-density new snow could run fast and far, packing a punch.

It's only been one day since we've had someone trigger a slab avalanche on our buried persistent weak layer. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we saw slab avalanches remotely triggered and human triggered on this weak layer. For me, I need more than a day of no avalanche activity before I trust this problem. Eric Trenbeath UAC Forecaster is visiting from Moab and summarized this problem well:

"I've been observing the Wasatch snowpack history from afar and this was my first day out in the field up here. It's my impression that the PWL presents the greatest danger on steep northerly aspects where the snowpack is right around 100 cms or less. Terrain also seems to play a significant roll. In addition to steepness, a certain amount of "scrappyness" or complexity seems to be a contributing factor as well. Steep, rocky slopes with convex features, or even sparse trees seem the most likely areas to trigger an avalanche. Broad, planar slopes, especially those with a deeper snowpack seem less likely. It is, however, a bit like rolling the dice. For our part, we continued to avoid slopes much more than 30 degrees".