In partnership with: Utah Division of State
Parks and Recreation, The Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center, Utah Department
of Emergency Services and Homeland Security and
AVALANCHE ADVISORY
Sunday, December 11, 2005 7:30am
Good morning,
this is Drew Hardesty with the
On Monday,
December 12th between 10am-2pm, UDOT will be sighting in their
artillery for the Kessler, Argenta, and Stairs Gulch avalanche paths. Please avoid these areas during this time. UDOT also has a highway avalanche control
work hotline for Little Cottonwood road, which is updated as needed.
801-975-4838.
Up coming avalanche awareness talks by the UAC
staff include:
Dec 13 7 pm REI, 3285 E, 3300 S, SLC
Dec 14 6:30 pm Mountain
High Motorsports,
Dec 14 7 pm South Valley Unitarian,
Current Conditions:
Under clear skies, mountain temperatures this morning are in the mid twenties
at the higher elevations, cooling along the mountain drainages and basins to
the low teens. Winds are light and
northwesterly. Shady slopes have good
soft settled powder interspersed with localized wind damage while sunny aspects
are well crusted.
Avalanche Conditions:
Except for a few shallow wind drifts cracking out along the highest ridgelines,
no avalanche activity was reported yesterday from the backcountry. Even avalanche control work at the ski areas
in uncompacted terrain produced no results.
Folks heading for the bolder lines, however, shouldn’t forget that even
minor wet sluffing and shallow wind drifts knocking you off your feet can have
disastrous consequences.
It’s still not out of the realm of possibility of
triggering a slide on the weak, sugary facets near the ground. The most likely place a person would trigger
one of these deeper slides would be on a steep northwest through east facing slope
above about 9000 feet. Likely trigger
points would be steep shallow rocky areas.
Bottom Line:
While most slopes have a LOW avalanche danger
today, a MODERATE
danger remains on steep shady upper elevation slopes that have a thin
snowpack. With daytime heating, it may be
possible to trigger a few wet sluffs today.
Mountain Weather (updated by noon daily):
We’ll see sunny
skies with daytime highs in the mid to upper 30’s at 8000’ and near freezing at
10,000’. Winds will be light from the
northwest. A quick moving storm is
forecast to move through on Tuesday that should give us another shot of snow.
Regional
Snow Profile (this profile can also
be found daily off our home page under avalanche products)
Seasonal Weather History Charts.
Please
report any backcountry snow and avalanche conditions you observe. Call (801) 524-5304 or 1-800-662-4140, email [email protected] or fax 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.
To
have this advisory automatically e-mailed to you each day, click HERE. (You must re-sign up this season even if you
were on the list last season.)
The annual report for 2004-05 is now on the web.
(Click HERE,
8mb)
I will update
this advisory by 7:30 Monday morning. Thanks for calling.