Mainly Quiet on the Western Front

The current snowdepth at Alta Collins sits at 83" after peaking at 92" on Saturday.

Some people have asked me about the prospects of a Steenburgh Winter this year, that period from when Alta-Collins first reaches 100 inches to February 10th when the mid day sun angle and day length start to really increase and have an increasingly caustic influence on snow, first on south aspects and eventually as we go deeper into spring on all aspects.  Steenburgh winter is the creme-de-la-creme of backcountry ski conditions with a deep snowpack to enable good coverage across a lot of terrain and low-angle sun for powder preservation.

The potential for the start of Steenburgh winter looks quite low for the next ten days.  Ridging is in firm control currently along the Pacific coast this morning.

That ridge meanders a bit, but remains in place really for the next 10 days or so.  About all we can hope for is a trough to slide down its front side and drop into our area.  Unfortunately, such systems are often fairly moisture starved.  Below is an example from the GFS forecast valid 5 PM MST Sunday. 

The Utah snow ensemble thus has just a couple of weak systems coming through such as the one above, with some variations in intensity and timing between the ensemble members.  There's always the hope that one of those systems gives us a decent dump of low-density dendrites, but 75% of the members are producing less than 6" of snow over the next 10 days.  

Thus, I'll call it mainly quiet on the western front, with the hopes that we at least get a little bit of a refresh with the passage of one of these moisture starved systems.  Sometimes a bit of moisture and instability does the job in Little Cottonwood, so maybe we'll get lucky, but the start of Steenburgh winter looks unlikely during this period.