Wasatch-Cache National Forest  In partnership with:  Utah State Parks and Recreation, Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center-Logan, and Utah State University College of Natural Resources.

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Logan area Avalanche advisory

Saturday January 14, 2006

Good Morning, this is Dave Kikkert with your Logan area backcountry avalanche and mountain weather advisory from the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center.  It's Saturday January 14th at 7:00 am.  This advisory is brought to you in part by the Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center in Logan with help from ruoutside.com.

Current Conditions:

It will be another one of those warm and windy transition days ahead of what could be another good snow storm arriving tonight.  It is right around freezing at nearly all the mountain weather stations and southwest winds are blowing near 35 mph along the ridge tops.  Turning and riding conditions remained excellent yesterday on protected, shady slopes.  However, sunny slopes will have a thin crust on them today and higher elevations will likely be wind affected.

Avalanche Conditions:

Yesterday there continued to be quite a few human triggered soft-slab avalanches observed or reported in wind affected terrain.  Most of these avalanches were small, generally about a foot deep and running within the new snow.   These small soft-slabs have been pretty benign and easy to safely trigger with slope cuts and cornice drops.  The sad part is this will begin to change today as another storm approaches accompanied by strong southwest winds.   There is plenty of snow out there to drift around and with winds cranking from the south-southwest this morning near 40 mph I would expect new wind-drift avalanches to be a bit deeper and more hazardous today, and activity to become more widespread.  The danger will rise further once snowfall begins in earnest this evening.   For the future keep in mind a mid snowpack weak layer about 20 inches down.   I wouldn't expect any direct activity on this layer today but it could be activated by the weight of a new snow avalanche or future snowfall.

The good news and the end of it all is that outside of wind effected terrain the snowpack seems really quite stable which has let people track a lot of nice lines.

Bottom Line:

There's is a  MODERATE avalanche danger on wind exposed slopes steeper than about 35 degrees.  On most lower and mid-elevation slopes and in the sheltered areas across the region the danger is LOW.   The Utah Avalanche Center has issued a special avalanche statement: The avalanche danger will increase rapidly tonight through Monday as a strong storm system impacts the northern Utah mountains.  Strong winds and heavy snowfall will create a Considerable to High avalanche danger Sunday into Monday.
 

Mountain Weather:

Windy and warm today ahead of an approaching Pacific storm slated to arrive late tonight.  There is a Winter Storm Watch in effect until late Sunday night with snowfall set to begin around midnight with 4-8 inches possible overnight and up to foot forecast for Sunday.  Temperatures should drop significantly tonight with the passage of the cold front. 

General Information: 

For a list of our upcoming classes and awareness talks, go to our Education page .

For a list of recent avalanches in the regional backcountry go to Avalanche List. 

Snow nerds, check out the new Snow Profiles page.  You may enjoy our Images Page.

Please send backcountry observations to [email protected] or leave a message at 755-3638, especially if you see or trigger an avalanche in the backcountry. We really want to hear from you, even if you think your observation is unimportant.    The information you provide may save lives...

Toby Weed will update this advisory tomorrow morning.

The information in this advisory is from the U.S. Forest Service, which is solely responsible for its content.  This advisory describes general avalanche conditions and local variations always occur. 

National Weather Service - Salt Lake City - Snow.