Wasatc h
Cache National Forest
In partnership with: The Friends of the Utah Avalanche Forecast Center, Utah Department of
Public Safety Division of Comprehensive Emergency Management, Salt Lake County,
and Utah State Parks
The
Utah Avalanche Center
Home page is: http://www.avalanche.org/~uac/
Avalanche advisory
If you want this advisory
automatically e-mailed to you each day, click HERE.
If you want recent archives
of this advisory, click HERE.
To e-mail us an observation, CLICK HERE.
Good Morning. This is Bruce Tremper with the
Current Conditions:
Well, we give up. If the winter is going to insist on being so
boring, so are we. We’re only doing
afternoon updates on the phone lines until we get some significant snow. We figure we’ll embarrass the winter into
submission, but somehow, I doubt if it really cares.
This warm, sunny weather has
melted a lot of the snow off the southerly facing, sun exposed slopes and there’s
only about 1 ˝ to 2 feet of snow on the shady northwest through northeast
facing slopes. Surprisingly enough, the
snow on wind and sun sheltered, gentle slopes is pretty darn good for skiing,
snowboarding and snowmobiling. It’s soft
and settled recrystalized snow, which we sometimes call “loud powder”. It is fairly rocky, though, so bring your
old equipment that you don’t mind beating up a little.
Avalanche Conditions:
No, there’s still not much
news in the avalanche department. It’s
still low danger on all slopes. You can
sometimes get a small sluff going on steep, shady slopes within the faceted
snow but otherwise there’s nothing going on until we put a slab of snow on top
of all this weak, sugary snow.
Bottom Line (SLC,
The avalanche danger is
generally LOW today.
Mountain Weather:
Speaking of which, we still
don’t see any significant snow on the way.
Temperatures in the mountains remain in the mid 20’s along the ridge tops
and they will warm up to the upper 30’s around 8,000’. Ridge top winds will remain light from the
northwest. There will be a weak brush-by
storm passing to the north of us on Wednesday and Thursday, which probably won’t
affect our weather very much, then another weak system, which will dive mostly
south of us for the weekend.
General Information:
Tonight, our forecasters, Evelyn
Lees and Ethan Greene will be giving a multi-media avalanche awareness talk at
the REI in
A great Christmas present for
someone you love is an avalanche beacon.
To help you decide which one to buy, we have posted a couple recent
tests of various brands of avalanche beacons on the web. Point your browser to www.avalanche.org and click on Salt Lake,
then on Education. At the same location,
you can find a complete list of avalanche talks and multi-day classes.
To report backcountry snow
and avalanche conditions, especially if you observe or trigger an avalanche,
call (801) 524-5304 or 1-800-662-4140, or email to [email protected] or fax to
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.
Evelyn Lees will update this advisory on Wednesday
afternoon.
Thanks for calling!
________________________________________________________________________
National Weather Service - Salt
Lake City - Snow.
For an explanation of
avalanche danger ratings: