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Avalanche advisory
Monday, March 28, 2005
Good morning, this is
Current Conditions:
We have typical spring weather: if you don’t like it, wait 5 minutes. As our
next storm approaches, the ridge top winds are howling 40mph gusting to 65. Ridge top temperatures stayed very warm
overnight and they are around freezing.
The intense sun and warm temperatures over the weekend made mashed
potatoes out of the snow and most everything has a breakable crust this
morning except for some patches of powder on the upper elevation, straight
north facing slopes.
Avalanche Conditions:
We snuck through the Easter weekend without any avalanche fatalities. Since Friday, there were a total of 13 people
involved in avalanches, 10 or those were caught in 3 incidents, there were
three serious injuries and luckily no fatalities. In the latest incident, Sunday morning a
group of four was booting up Cardiff Bowl a backcountry area north of Alta when
they triggered a 4-foot deep hard slab that caught all of them with one person
buried to her waist, another one suffered some bruises but they were all OK. It was on a northeast facing, 45 degree slope
at 9,900’. It broke 4 feet deep and
about 70 feet wide. The slab was the new
snow from this past week sliding on the old, hard snow from earlier in the
month with some weak faceted snow both on top and underneath the crust as the
weak layer. See
PHOTOS.
We worried about wet avalanches over the weekend, but luckily cooler
temperatures and clouds on Saturday and a cooling wind on Sunday kept wet
activity to mainly widespread wet sluffing (PHOTO
on
But hey, all that is so last-weekend. We
have another snowy week ahead with the next storm starting today. The nukin’ ridge
top winds from the southwest this morning will create localized deposits of both
soft and hard wind slabs, mostly along the upper elevation ridges. Then, the snow should start in earnest around
mid day and give us perhaps a foot of dense snow by Tuesday morning and perhaps
another couple feet by Thursday morning.
I expect that this first round of snow will bond fairly well to the old
snow surface since it’s very warm this morning.
But as always, you will need to test it throughout the day. Since it’s right at the surface it’s easy to jump on test
slopes and dig down with your hand and cut out little blocks and pull on them
to see how well the new snow is bonded.
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Bottom Line
(Salt Lake and Park City, Ogden and Provo mountains)
The
avalanche danger this morning is MODERATE today on any slope with recent wind
deposits and the danger of soft slabs within the new snow will likely rise to MODERATE
later in the day as the snow accumulates.
Danger Scale: http://www.avalanche.org/~uac/ed-scale.htm
Mountain Weather: (You can find the afternoon
Weather Update here.)
I’m expecting about 8 inches of fairly dense snow today with a foot on the
ground by Tuesday morning. Ridge top
winds will die down later today to 25 from the west. Ridge top temperatures will cool from near
freezing this morning to about 25 by tonight.
Then, we will have a bit of a lull on Tuesday with the next, stronger
and colder wave hitting us on Tuesday night through Thursday with perhaps
another couple feet of snow.
The
Powderbird guides were in American Fork and the
If you are getting out, we appreciate
your snowpack and avalanche observations.
Please call and leave a message at 524-5304 or 1-800-662-4140, or e-mail
us at [email protected]. Fax is 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.
Drew Hardesty will update this
advisory by 7:30 on Tuesday morning.
Thanks for calling.