Avalanche Forecast

The strong warm front that has been causing rain all day Tuesday is expected to pass by early Wednesday with cooling and a period of moderate precipitation along with continued strong winds.

Further cooling and lighter showers are expected later Wednesday with strong southwest winds shifting to strong westerly winds.

This weather will cause a transition in the snowpack from wet and saturated surface layers to a draining and gradually refreezing upper snowpack. Cooling should change rain to snow by Wednesday to gradually lower elevations. New shallow snow should begin building on the refreezing snowpack. This transition should form a good bond of new snow to the forming crust.

Continued strong winds are likely to transport new snow and begin forming some wind slab layers on lee slopes below ridges by later Wednesday. 

With less snow below treeline, wet loose snow avalanches will not be in the forecast. But change your plans if you find wet snow deeper than a few inches or see signs of wet loose activity such as pin wheels or natural wet loose avalanches.

 

 

 

Weather and Snowpack:

We had a wet and wild November with about 18-22 inches of water at NWAC station at Mt Hood only amounting to about 1-2 feet of snow above 6000 feet. This formed a strong crust in mid November.

 In late November, strong high pressure and sunny weather persisted over Mt Hood.

The weather so far in December has become very active, with heavy snowfall at Mt Hood through early Monday, followed by very heavy rain to high elevations Monday afternoon. Timberline had 1 inch of rain in an hour's time this afternoon!. 

While the Washington Cascades received very heavy rain Tuesday, the Mt Hood area was spared the onslaught and only had light to moderate rain. Some consolation!  

Reports:

We don't have a great deal of recent observations from the Mt Hood zone of late, it's been raining too hard after all.

The Mt Hood Meadows pro-patrol on Sunday found little on avalanche control. But on a northeast slope at 6600 feet a ski cut gave a sensitive 6-8 inch nearly fully path slab avalanche that released on the mid November crust.

The snowpack is now well saturated and likely freely draining surface water. This should form a good solid crust when temperatures drop beginning Wednesday.