Thursday, April 06, 2006 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, April 06, 2006, and its about 7:30 am. Current Conditions: After a couple days of crying wolf, the big low pressure system is finally, finally starting to kick in. Overnight, the Cottonwood Canyons got 4-5 inches of snow, which is a dense 12 percent water at 8,000 and around 10 percent above 10,000. Temperatures have finally dropped to the mid 20s. Yesterday morning ranked high in the annals of suffering and misery with soggy, gloppy snow mixed with breakable crust, light rain and gloomy clouds but hey, at least you had the pleasure of dodging lightning bolts along with high winds and squalls of graupel that would sting your face. Inexplicably, the backcountry seemed deserted. In the afternoon, about 3-4 inches of dense snow fell at higher elevations with rain below about 8,000. Recent Avalanche Activity & Snowpack Discussion: If an avalanche falls in the mountains and theres no one there to see it, is it still an avalanche? Yesterday was a good day to find out because the only people wandering around in the backcountry were paid to be there and not enough, I might add. Nevertheless, it appeared that very few avalanches occurred yesterday, just a little cracking of new wind slabs along the exposed ridges. Today may be a different story. We expect 8-12 inches of new snow today with strong winds from the northwest. This will almost certainly create some widespread, sensitive wind slabs on any steep, wind drifted slope. The snow will be dense. The slabs will pack a punch and could easily tangle you up and drag you down the hill. As always, you should avoid all steep slopes with recent deposits of wind drifted snow. Down out of the wind, I expect that the new snow will bond fairly well to the pre-existing, wet snow surface, but as always, there may be density inversions within the new snow and you should test for these by jumping on test slopes, doing slope cuts and pulling on blocks that you cut out with your hand. Bottom Line: New snow and wind will cause the avalanche danger to rise rapidly today from LOW danger this morning to CONSIDERABLE danger later in the day on any steep slope with recent deposits of wind drifted snow. There will be a MODERATE danger on non-wind drifted slopes. Mountain Weather: As moisture wraps around the top of the low pressure center, we should have snow impact northern Utah from the northwest. The storm should pile up around 8 inches of new snow today in most areas and as much as a foot in some locations. The rain-snow line should be around 6,000. Ridge top winds will pick up and blow around 30 mph from the northwest with gusts to around 50. Ridge top temperatures will remain around 20 degrees today and be around 30 degrees down at 8,000. Tonight, we should have some lingering snow showers with perhaps 3-4 more inches accumulation and the winds should die down. Friday, the skies should clear and temperatures will warm up to near freezing, which should give us a round of wet sluffs on Friday. Then, the weekend looks warm with high clouds and we should have another weaker storm on Monday and Tuesday.