Utah Avalanche Center forecaster Craig Gordon said very little snow doesn’t mean very little avalanche risk.
“It is so counterintuitive, thinking that, ‘Well not much snow has stacked up and it’s got to be good to go,’” Gordon said. “Actually, what occurs in the structure of the snowpack is that lean years are actually more dangerous years.”
Gordon said that’s because it’s easier for rapid changes to occur in a shallow snowpack. He said backcountry skiers and riders should hope for consistent snowfall in the coming weeks before temperatures drop.
“Because that adds nice, thick insulating blankets of snow, and that warmth is actually good for the snowpack,” Gordon said. “Those coarse, little grainy, what we call facets, or that sugary snow, it allows that to not even develop in our early season snowpack. And remember last year, most of us already had a dozen days of skiing and riding in under our belts, and that’s not the case right now.”
Utah set a record with nearly 1,200 reported avalanches last winter, nearly five times the number of slides in the year before.
“Even though it was a historic year, it was kind of a designer’s snowpack,” Gordon said. “We got into what I call the two sexiest words in meteorology, and that’s ‘atmospheric river.’ Utah does really good once we get that big fire hose going.”
For the upcoming winter, Gordon provided this take on conditions.
“What’s nice right now is that the snow that is preexisting in our mountains is generally on the north half of the compass and really it’s at the upper elevations,” he said. “Realize once it starts snowing, once winter returns here like it always does in Utah, those are going to be the kinds of slopes and terrain that we want to avoid. And then maybe we just want to swing over to those slopes that didn’t have the preexisting snow that could have grown weak and sugary in this interim.”
If backcountry conditions are too dangerous, Gordon said people can always rely on resorts, which perform their own avalanche mitigation.
The Utah Avalanche Center’s website is the one stop shop for local avalanche information. It includes daily terrain reports, an avalanche log, and details on upcoming classes.
