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Avalanche Information
Thursday, April 28,
2005 5:30 pm
Good afternoon, this is
Current Conditions:
As the cold front pushed into northern
Mountain Weather:
We have an obviously very juicy convergence zone that is slowly sagging
southward and it will be over the
Avalanche
Information:
This morning, people in the Salt Lake area mountains reported that the new snow
was bonding fairly well to the old melt-freeze crust but you could find some
localized wind slabs in upper elevation wind exposed terrain that you could get
to crack out about a foot deep or so.
When you get out on Friday, we will have more snow to deal with—possibly
significantly more snow. So, as usual, you will need to carefully check how the new snow
is behaving by jumping on test slopes, doing slope cuts and simply digging down
with your hand. Also, as always, you
should avoid any steep slope with recent deposits of wind drifted snow. Most of these problems are close the surface
so they will be relatively easy to see and easy to deal with, but if the snow
piles up more than a foot deep, especially in wind drifted, steep slopes,
things could get more serious.
Also, if the sun does come out, remember to stay off of and out
from underneath steep, sun-exposed slopes as they will almost instantly begin to
shed they load of new snow as the cold, dry snow warms up for the first time in
the strong spring sun.
Since we are operating on a reduced staff and there’s not much information
coming in this time of year, we won’t issue any avalanche danger ratings.
Finally, remember that with the exception of Snowbird, all the ski resorts are
closed for the season and they are not doing any avalanche control. So you need to treat them like the
backcountry and follow the usual safe-travel ritual, like one-at-a-time, don’t
travel above other people and get out of the way at the bottom.
We will probably end our avalanche advisories for the season after this
weekend.
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.