The danger of wet avalanches will rise to CONSIDERABLE (3) in the backcountry, with solar heating and greenhousing warming the already saturated snow on many steep slopes today. Triggered wet avalanches will become likely and some naturals can be expected again with daytime heating. Dangerous avalanche conditions also persist in steep shady mid elevation terrain, where a very persistent weak layer buried in early February is still a threat, and triggered avalanches remain probable on slopes steeper than about 30 degrees.. Some avalanches might be triggered from a distance, or worse, from below...

Careful snowpack evaluation, cautious route-finding and conservative decision-making are essential for safe backcountry travel.

The Bear River Range only picked up a couple inches from Thursday night's storm, with up to about 6 observed in the southern part of the range and in the Wellsvilles.. We found nice conditions in shady terrain, where the underlying snow was still somewhat soft.

Hard to believe, but the Tony Grove Snotel reports only about 2 inches of new snow from the storm, with 2/10ths of an inch of water accumulation in the last 48 hrs. There's 71 inches of total snow containing 68% of average water for the date. It's 17 degrees and there's an increasing moderate southeast wind up at the 9700' CSI weather station on Logan Peak, currently recording an average wind speed of around 20 mph...

Numerous natural loose wet avalanches occurred in the region in the last couple days, with lower and mid elevation slopes most active.. Avalanches this week descended into low elevation terrain not normally thought of as dangerous, like Lower Green Canyon and the Logan River Trail. Friday afternoon, a wet avalanche crossed both lanes and closed down highway 89 in the Dugway section of Logan Canyon for a few hours. The daytime natural avalanche dropped tons of heavy wet debris on the highway from a mostly west facing slope at around 6300' in elevation. Also Friday, a skier triggered a good sized slab avalanche in Logan Dry Canyon on the west side of Logan Peak. He was able to self arrest on the bed surface as the 14" deep and around 100' wide avalanche somewhat "slowly" ran around him. The avalanche sympathetic triggered another slightly deeper slide below. Both avalanches failed on an extremely persistent weak surface hoar (frost) layer that was buried on February 10th.

Here's an updated local backcountry avalanche list:

Should be a nice and warm day in the mountains today under a short-lived ridge of high pressure. Expect mountain temperatures to surmount freezing, with a high of about 35 degrees expected at 9000', with lots of sunshine and some clouds building in this afternoon to help trap the heat... Clouds will blow in tonight ahead of a Pacific storm which is heading well to our south but might bring a snowflake or two for Sunday. Periods of snowfall are expected to continue well into next week, but accumulations in our area will likely be light at best.....

I will be issuing morning avalanche advisories for the Logan area on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

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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.

I will update this forecast Monday morning. Thanks for checking in....