We will be issuing intermittent avalanche advisories for the rest of the season. We will likely issue advisories each afternoon this week through the storm cycle, and then go back to more intermittent advisories as the avalanche conditions stabilize.

The avalanche danger will depend on how much snow we get Thursday night and how much sun we get on Friday, so it’s your responsibility to monitor the conditions carefully. Most likely we will have a MODERATE danger of both wet sluffs and dry slabs within the new snow.

Storm totals since Tuesday are over 3 feet of dense snow in the upper elevations of the Cottonwood Canyons and Park City with 3-4 inches of water weight. The storm was quite warm, so new snow amounts were very elevation dependent. For instance, places like Snowbasin, which is 2000 feet lower than the Cottonwood Canyon resorts, had the same water amounts but only 10 inches of snow.

After widespread natural and human triggered avalanche activity within the new snow on Wednesday, it settled out quite a bit overnight, as is common with dense, warm snow. Avalanche control for the Cottonwood Canyon produced mostly shallow wind slabs in upper elevation wind exposed terrain with explosives, but there were a few larger slides 2 feet deep and close to 200 feet wide. In the clearing today, we could see some larger natural avalanches that occurred probably on Wednesday. Two notable ones were on the north facing slopes beneath the Pfeifferhorn and also on Red Baldy. These look to be over 2 feet deep and quite wide. There were also some cornice breaks today, both natural and human triggered.

The closed low pressure system is centered in southern Utah and should slowly move eastward. As the moist, unstable air rotates counterclockwise around it, some more moisture should wrap around and come into us from the north and northeast overnight, giving us a few more inches of snow. These kinds of spring storms are notoriously hard to forecast, so we could easily get no snow tonight or we could just as easily get a foot. Be sure to monitor the National Weather Service web site (or follow the links on our Weather Page) so you can see what happened overnight and the weather forecast for the day on Friday. Ridge top temperatures are forecast to be in the lower 20’s overnight with light winds from the north. Friday’s high should be in the mid 30’s and in the mid 40’s down at 8,000’. Then, we finally have a strong, high-pressure system moving in for the at least another week, so the weekend should be quite warm and sunny.

We will be issuing intermittent avalanche advisories for the rest of the season. We will likely issue advisories each afternoon this week through the storm cycle, and then go back to more intermittent advisories as the avalanche conditions stabilize.

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We appreciate any and all late season avalanche and snow observations, so keep them coming!! Please leave us a message at (801) 524-5304 or 1-800-662-4140, or email us at uac@utahavalanchecenter.org. (Fax 801-524-6301).

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 advisory on Friday afternoon.