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Thursday, January 27, 2005
Good morning, this is
Bruce Tremper with the
This Friday,
January 28th, Brett Kobernik will be giving a free avalanche talk at
Milosport in
Current Conditions:
The song, “Ding, Dong, the
Witch is Dead” keeps running through my head.
The storm has broken the back of our nasty temperature inversion. Overnight, 4 inches of snow fell in the Cottonwood
Canyons with 6 inches at upper elevations of
Avalanche Conditions:
This new snow shouldn’t
change the avalanche conditions too much today but as it adds up, things could
get more interesting. We have no lack of
hard crusts on sun exposed slopes that could provide a slick bed surface, but
with the warm temperatures at the start of the storm, I suspect that the new
snow will bond fairly well. I’m much
more concerned about the north facing slopes where we have some weak,
recrystallized snow, which will produce more persistent avalanche problems. Unlike the last storm, the potential weak
layers are near the surface, so you can easily check to see how well the new
snow is bonded to the old snow surface. Jump
on lots of test slopes as you travel and dig down with your hand and pull on
the snow to see how well it’s bonded.
The winds should stay light today but as they pick up tonight and
through the weekend, they may create some localized wind slabs especially along
the ridges. So as always, avoid any
steep slope with recent wind deposits. I’m
guessing that we won’t see any more of those big, deep, monster avalanches, but
the smart folks are still suspicious of large, mid to upper elevation slopes
that face north through east.
Bottom Line (
Most slopes
have a LOW avalanche danger, but the danger will rise
to MODERATE as the new snow piles up to more than
about six inches, or if the wind picks up and deposits snow into wind drifts.
Mountain Weather:
The snow should turn
showery for most of the day with 1-3 inches.
We have another pulse coming through tonight, which may give us another
6 inches of snow by Friday morning. The
pulse this evening should come in on a westerly flow, which should put a more
even blanket across the mountains. Then,
we have another shot of snow on Saturday.
Today, ridge top winds should remain light from the south but they will
pick up to around 15 mph from the southwest tonight. Ridge top temperatures will be around 25
today and around freezing at 8,000’.
For the extended forecast,
it looks like a cold pocket of air will slip down to the east of us later in
the weekend and keep our ridgetop winds blowing from the east through the first
part of the week with cooler temperatures.
Then a high pressure ridge builds over us again through most of next
week.
Yesterday Powderbird Guides
flew in Day’s Fork and Cascade Ridge near
Snowbird is
hosting its 2nd annual Backcountry Avalanche Awareness Week January
31 – February 7th as a benefit for the
If you see anything we
ought to know about please call and leave a message at 524-5304, or
1-800-662-4140, or e-mail us at [email protected],
remember we can’t be everywhere at once, so we depend on people just like
you.
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.
Brett Kobernik will update this advisory by 7:30 on
Friday morning.
Thanks for calling
For an explanation of
avalanche danger ratings: