Wasatch Cache and Uinta National Forests

In partnership with: Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center, The Friends of the Utah Avalanche Center and Utah State Parks.

Avalanche ADVISORY

Good morning. This is Craig Gordon with the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center with your avalanche and mountain weather advisory for the western Uinta Mountains. Today is Saturday, January 17, 2004 and it’s 7:30 a.m.

Current conditions:

Skies cleared out nicely last night allowing temperatures to dip into the mid teens at most mountaintop locations. Currently it’s 16 degrees at 10,000’ and winds are generally out of the north at speeds of 10-20 mph along the ridges. Snow surface conditions range from stiff wind patted snow at the upper elevations, to mostly supportable crusts on the sunny slopes at mid and lower elevations. In between, good recrystalized powder can still be found on shady, wind sheltered slopes, though many of the more popular areas have seen quite a bit of traffic.

Avalanche Conditions:

It’s another great day to get out of the valley fog, murk, or whatever choice terms you might have for it and head for the mountains, where the skies are clear and the daytime highs are at least 10 degrees warmer than the Salt Lake Valley.

With high pressure firmly entrenched over the region all remains quiet on the eastern front and I haven’t heard of or seen any avalanche activity for over a week. For now, many of the deeper instabilities within the snowpack that I’ve been concerned about have relaxed and are starting to gain strength especially in areas where the snowpack is deep. That’s good news for the pack in general, however, the surface snow is bearing the brunt of all this clear weather and it continues to weaken overtime. What this all means in the big picture is once it starts snowing or blowing again, the weak near surface facets that have developed won’t be able to withstand much of an additional load before they fail and we start to see avalanches.

Bottom Line:

At all elevations the avalanche danger is generally LOW today. Human triggered avalanches are unlikely.

Mountain Weather:

Skies will be mostly sunny and temperatures slowly rising this weekend. Look for highs today at 10,000’ to be in the upper 20’s and at 8,000’ near 35 degrees. Overnight lows will be near 20 degrees. Winds will be out of the east through southeast at speeds of 15-20 mph along the ridges this morning and should die down throughout the day. Sunday we can expect some high clouds to move in and a weak cold front with a little bit of moisture will come into play for Monday and Tuesday. This isn’t a big system, though it may help to freshen things up a bit.

General Information:

We can always use snow and avalanche information and your snowpack and avalanche observations could help to save someone’s life. If you see or trigger an avalanche give us a call at 801-231-2170 or 1-800-662-4140.

Also, if you’d like to schedule a free avalanche awareness talk and/or field day give us a call at 801-524-5304.

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.

This advisory will be updated by 7:30 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2004.

Thanks for calling.