Overall, the avalanche danger rating for the Manti Skyline is LOW today.
The wind has been blowing for a few days. It's created fresh drifts and cornices. Many of these will be stubborn to release however some may still be sensitive to a person today.
Anticipate the danger to increase during the next few days with the anticipated storm.
With lots of recent wind, you'll find wind crusts, drifts, and slabs all over the place in the higher terrain. It seems to me that most of these drifts are welded into place. Areas where you could possibly trigger something today would be on VERY steep slopes near the ridges. These won't be large avalanches but could be big enough to knock you around and cause injury.
Current Conditions: The Skyline has been blasted by wind and you'll need to hunt around pretty hard to find areas of settled snow where good riding can be had. The wind has been from the southwest. It's still pretty breezy along the peaks but has slowed down in the canyon bottoms. Temperatures have been hovering in the low to mid 20s over the last 48 hours.
Mountain Weather: Today we'll see cloudy skies, moderate speed southwest wind and high temperatures in the mid 20s. We have a prolonged storm system moving in which will produce snow. Most of it will happen Wednesday into Thursday. I'm thinking 8 to 12" of new snow by sometime Thursday. The storm trough then starts to "close off" and drifts down the California coast, feeding moisture into Utah in a southwest flow. We should see lingering periods of snow Friday. The storm system continues spinning to our southwest and working its way east through the weekend. As it does this, we should see another period of snow Saturday night into Sunday.
This forecast is from the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, which is solely responsible for its content. This forecast describes general avalanche conditions and local variations always occur.
