Wasatch Cache National Forest
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 Salt Lake County.

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AVALANCHE ADVISORY

Thursday, March 29, 2007  7:30 am
Good morning, this is Bruce Tremper with the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center with your backcountry avalanche and mountain weather advisory.  Today is Thursday, March 29, 2007 and it’s 7:30 in the morning.

 

Current Conditions:

For a storm that was “officially a bust,” it sure felt nice to me yesterday and hundreds of other people with big smiles on their faces.  It almost felt like March, which I always like to remind people, is historically, the snowiest month of the winter.  Overnight, Alta reported 4 more inches of snow making their storm total of 18 inches, which is now settled down to about half that amount.  Most other areas got 2 inches overnight with storm totals a foot or less, which seems fairly evenly spread through northern Utah. The snow remains delightful on northerly facing slopes above about 9,000’ in elevation, but as is usual this time of year, it turned to various textures of mashed potatoes on the other aspects.  Ridge top temperatures remained in the teens yesterday with light winds.

 

Avalanche Discussion:

The only avalanche activity from yesterday was easy sluffing of the new snow on the old, frozen surface on slopes approaching 40 degrees and steeper.  Most of the sluffs were small and relatively harmless, but some on the larger, steep slopes were large enough to bury a person.  Most of the sluffing will have settled out by today but if the sun comes out, you can expect widespread sluffing of damp new snow on the steep slopes that face the south half of the compass.

 

Bottom Line for the Salt Lake, Park City, Provo and Ogden area mountains: 

The avalanche danger is generally LOW on most slopes with a MODERATE danger of wet sluffs on slopes approaching 40 degrees or steeper on slopes that are getting wet from solar heading.  

 

Mountain Weather: 

We’ll see continued clouds and fog at least this morning but you should get it quick today because the sun will likely come out by mid day, which will goober up the snow in a hurry.  Ridge top winds will remain light from the northeast and north with ridge top temperatures in the mid teens.  It should be mostly cloudy on Friday with a chance for light snow showers.

The extended forecast calls for sunny on Saturday, some clouds for Sunday and slowly increasing temperatures.  So we will be back to freezing on the ridge tops by Saturday.  We don’t see any significant snow for the next 10 days.

 

Announcements:

The Wasatch Powderbird Guides didn’t fly yesterday and if they can fly today, they will be in Silver, Days, Cardiff, Mineral, American Fork and Mill Creek. For more info, call 742-2800.

 

The Canyons Professional Ski Partol Association is hosting a fundraiser for the Friends of the Utah Avalalanche Center April 1, at 7:30 at Side Car in Park City.

 

Listen to the advisory.  Try our new streaming audio or podcasts

UDOT highway avalanche control work info can be found HERE or by calling (801) 975-4838.

Our statewide tollfree line is 1-888-999-4019 (early morning, option 8).

For a list of avalanche classes, click HERE
For our classic text advisory click HERE.
To sign up for automated e-mails of our graphical advisory click HERE

We appreciate all the great snowpack and avalanche observations we’ve been getting, so keep leaving us messages at (801) 524-5304 or 1-800-662-4140, or email us at [email protected]. (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.

Brett Kobernik will
update this advisory by 7:30 on Friday morning, and thanks for calling.