Wasatch
Cache National Forest
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Avalanche advisory
saturDAY,
FEBRUARY 23, 2002 3:00 PM
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Good afternoon, this is Bruce
Tremper with the
Current Conditions:
Overnight and this morning, 8,000’
temperatures rose to nearly 50 degrees and ridge top temperatures were near freezing
with 30 mph winds, gusting to 60 out of the south and southwest. This afternoon, however, temperatures are
beginning to fall along with the wind speeds.
Yesterday and this morning, the snow was wet or damp almost all aspects
and elevations and the only dry snow left is above about 9,000’ on north facing
slopes.
Avalanche Conditions:
The
unseasonably warm weather produced quite a bit of wet point releases and some
wet slabs on steep slopes, especially near rock bands yesterday and especially
on the more southerly facing slopes. However,
with colder temperatures on the way, the wet snow will freeze up solid as a
rock. Even though the strong winds blew,
there wasn’t much snow to blow around so only shallow wind slabs formed in very localized areas near the ridge tops. As we’ve been mentioning these past several
days, we still have lots of very weak, faceted snow in thinner snowpack areas
such as lower and mid elevations in the Salt Lake area mountains and in most
places in the Provo and Uinta mountains.
Much of the time you are just wallowing in this almost bottomless depth
hoar and it obviously won’t support much additional weight. For instance, yesterday in the western Uinta
Mountains, a snowmobiler triggered a hard slab on top
of depth hoar and was caught on a northeast facing slope on Bald Mountain that
broke out 4-6 feet deep and 200 feet wide around 10,000’ in elevation. I suspect that the colder temperatures tomorrow
will make it harder to trigger these deep, scary avalanches.
With
the storm coming in tonight and on Sunday, one problem will be the new snow
sliding on the old, hard, slick bed surfaces.
Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, depending on your perspective, we
probably won’t have much new snow to deal with.
If you’re getting out on Sunday, as usual, you should avoid steep slopes
with recent deposits of wind drifted snow.
The other problem is triggering a hard slab that overlies the weak, sugary
depth hoar, as I’ve said.
Bottom Line:
The
danger of human triggered avalanches is MODERATE on any slope steeper than about 35
degrees with recent wind drifts and also MODERATE on all slopes where slabs are underlain
by weak, faceted snow especially at mid and lower elevations. (considerable in the
(
In
areas that have had a thin snowpack most of the winter the snow is sugary and
weak with recent wind deposits on top.
The danger of human triggered avalanches is CONSIDERABLE
on slopes in the
(
Same
as
Mountain Weather:
The cold front arriving
tonight is a bit of a strange beast in that the cold front should arrive around
sun down, but the precipitation will wait until later tonight to arrive. Even when it does, it doesn’t have much
moisture with it and it looks like it will only produce light snow showers with
storm totals about 2-5 inches—and for you Olympic visitors who might think that
this kind of weather is normal, you should know that this is quite a small and
anticlimactic storm for the Wasatch Range. Snow should begin tonight, perhaps
As for the extended forecast,
skies should clear on Monday and remain cool with another weak storm on Tuesday
night into Wednesday, then perhaps another one next weekend.
General Information:
To
report backcountry snow and avalanche conditions, especially if you observe or
trigger an avalanche, you can leave a message at (801) 524-5304 or
1-800-662-4140. Or you can e-mail an
observation to uacobs@avalanche .org, or you can fax
an observation to 801-524-6301.
We
have a new icon-based,
short advisory posted each day at www.avalanche.org. We would appreciate any feedback on this new
product.
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.
Evelyn
Lees will update this advisory by
Thanks for calling!
________________________________________________________________________
For
more detailed weather information go to our Mountain Weather Advisory
National
Weather Service - Salt Lake City - Snow.
For an explanation of
avalanche danger ratings: