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Avalanche Information
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 6pm
Good evening, this is
Current Conditions:
We’re temporarily back to winter again with much colder temperatures and snow
in the mountains. Unfortunately, it’s
not much snow. Only couple inches fell
today at upper elevations and there is another burst occurring late this
afternoon that may add another couple inches.
Unfortunately, the wind is also blowing hard from the southeast and it’s
blowing the snow around quite a bit. The
rain-snow line is between 6,000 and 7,000 feet.
The old melt-freeze crust under the skiff of wind blown snow is quite
variable and the lone backcountry report I have today said that you were
punching through the crust into wet snow once in awhile. I expect that the continued cold temperatures
will freeze the crust a little thicker over the next couple days.
Avalanche Information:
There’s not much happening in the avalanche department since the colder temperatures
have locked up the wet activity and there’s not enough new snow to be much of a
problem. The only caution is that the
wind has created very localized shallow, soft wind
slabs. One person was able to kick off
one—a measly 2-4 inches deep and not too wide.
However as the new snow piles up and if the wind keeps blowing, you
might find some localized wind slabs a foot or so deep by morning, which could
be more of a problem. You will likely
find them especially along the upper elevation ridges. Since I
haven’t been in the field lately and we only have limited information coming in
this time of year, I won’t issue any danger ratings.
Mountain Weather:
We have a closed low pressure center moving over the top of us and taking its
sweet time. This should keep our skies
cloudy with scattered, light snow showers in the mountains with perhaps 1-3
inches of snow overnight and another inch or two on Wednesday. The rain-snow line should hover around 6,500’
and the ridge top temperatures should remain be around 20 degrees and the 8,000’
temperatures should be around 25 tonight and near freezing on Wednesday. Ridge top winds will be variable as the low
passes overhead.
If you run across anything we should know about, 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.
We’ll update this forecast as
conditions warrant, and thanks for calling.