Mother Nature temporarily halted the mad rush to summer in the high alpine this weekend. Check out the snowpack water equivalent (SWE) at Snowbird. Yes, there's our pathetic wintertime maximum, with a long period (nearly two months) without any major change. By late April, the snowpack had ripened (i.e., warmed to 0ºC through depth) and we began a major melt down with the SWE plummeting from 19.4 inches on April 29 to 11.4 inches on May 7th, an average loss of an inch of water per day.
Then Mother Nature put the stop to that melt off and even added a bit more to the balance, with the SWE at Snowbird now sitting at 12 inches after the Friday–Saturday storm.
Even with that temporary halt and recovery, the current snowpack is about the equivalent to the average/median snowpack conditions in early to mid June.
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