Wasatch 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

Monday, February 10, 2003

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To see a list of recent avalanches, CLICK HERE, (Updated 2-10-03)

Good Morning. This is Bruce Tremper with the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center with your backcountry avalanche and mountain weather advisory. Today is Monday, February 10, 2003, and it’s 7:30 in the morning. The Banff Film Festival is coming to Kingsbury Hall this week, February 12^th and 13^th, with different films each night. The Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center benefits from this event. Tickets are available at Kingsbury Hall, Art-Tix, the Outdoor Rec Program and REI, or call 581-8516 for information.

Current Conditions:

Mountain top temperatures have warmed 10 degrees from yesterday morning and the winds are still blowing strong from the northwest nearly 50 mph, gusting into the 60’s along the highest peaks and more like 15 mph on most ridge tops. There’s still fabulous powder snow on the wind and sun sheltered slopes with sun crusts on south facing slopes and some wind damage in above tree line upper elevations.

Avalanche Conditions:

Our string of avalanche activity remains active with at least five more avalanches reported from yesterday. I have the details on our other line at 364-1591. For a quick run down: A huge avalanche was reported in upper Mineral Fork 2-4 feet deep and 300 feet wide, which covered up a climbing skin track. This was probably a natural avalanche yesterday morning, but we’re not sure. A skier triggered, was caught and was able to ski out of a slab avalanche on Coleville Peak, which is north of Park City on a very steep, northeast facing slope, 1.5 feet deep and 100 feet wide. A natural occurred off the east side of Scott’s Peak near Park city 1-2’ deep and 140 feet wide. A natural slide occurred in West Monitor. People had completely tracked up an adjacent, lower angled slope over the past couple days and when they returned yesterday morning, they noticed that the steeper slope next to it had slid 1-1.5 feet deep and 70 feet wide. Finally, an avalanche class in the backcountry near Canyons was able to intentionally trigger a couple small slabs, probably from recent wind loading.

Although many of the popular slopes have been tracked out this past weekend without incident, as you can see, there are still lots of very scary avalanche activity. Although there’s only localized places where you can trigger an avalanche, the consequences are quite severe as they are breaking deep and often wide, so these are not the kind of conditions to choose bold lines. Most, but not all of these, are breaking in steep, shallow, rocky areas and especially places, which have slid previously this season. Warming temperatures these next few days will make the problem worse. Also, and probably more important, the wind is blowing again today with lots of new snow to drift. As always, you should avoid any steep slope with recent wind drifts.

Bottom Line (SLC, Park City, Ogden, Provo and Logan Area Mountains):

There is a MODERATE probability of triggering an avalanche with CONSIDERABLE consequences on slopes steeper than about 35 degrees that face the north half of the compass, plus east facing slopes that are above about 9,000 feet especially on shallow, rocky snowpacks. (Ogden – MODERATE above 8,500), and CONSIDERABLE on any steep slope with recent deposits of wind drifted snow. If you’re looking for LOW danger terrain, you should stay out of wind affected terrain, on slopes less steep than 30 degrees, at lower elevations and on south facing slopes.

Western Uintas – call 1-800-648-7433 or click here for weekend and holiday forecasts.

Mountain Weather:

Temperatures have warmed 10 degrees from yesterday morning and they will continue to warm over the next few days. Today the ridge top temperatures will get up to 14 degrees and the 8,000’ temperatures will get into the mid 20’s and will get into the lower 30’s tomorrow. Ridge top winds will continue to blow hard from the northwest 20-30, gusting into the 40’s and 50’s along the most exposed peaks. Today we’ll have a few clouds with the chance of a few light snow showers and then clearing this afternoon and tonight. For the extended forecast, we have warm, moist air coming in from the southwest on Wednesday and Thursday, which should give us some dense snow on top of our fabulous, light powder.

General Information:

Weather permitting, Wasatch Powderbird Guides will fly in Snake Creek and American Fork.

We will be giving a free avalanche awareness talk at Milo Sport on Wednesday, February 12^th at 7:00 pm. They are on 3300 South and 3119 East.

The Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center, are offering an intensive three-day avalanche class February 15 – 17. A generous donation by Voile and Milosport helps make this class affordable at $125. To sign up call the Black Diamond retail store at 801-278-0233.

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.

I will update this advisory by 7:30 on Tuesday morning.

Thanks for calling!

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National Weather Service - Salt Lake City - Snow.

For an explanation of avalanche danger ratings:

http://www.avalanche.org/usdanger.htm