Little Cottonwood Canyon will be closed this morning as the UDOT avalanche teams sight-in their artillery for the winter season. Backcountry closures are in effect with an estimated opening of 8am.

Alta Ski Area would remind folks that while the summer road to Catherine's is open, the Supreme area is closed to backcountry traffic as they conduct avalanche mitigation in order to open this terrain. Thanks -

Skies are overcast this morning with light to moderate westerly winds. Mountain temperatures are already in the upper 20s to low 30s. The Thanksgiving storms were a godsend and we now finally have a base of snow to work with. One to three feet of snow exists in the mid to upper elevations with excellent, if tentative, riding in the soft settled powder from the weekend. Surface hoar now glitters upon the snow surface in most areas, capping the weakening snow surfaces on the shady side of the compass . Sunny slopes will be crusted over this morning. (Surface Hoar pc: Keating. These are on plus-size feathers; whereas most are roughly 2-4mm)

Looking down the road, we'll see a series of weak westerly waves which should produce a trace to a couple inches of snow every day or so with a more potent storm on tap for Thursday night and perhaps again over the weekend. The later storms may be a central Wasatch special benefiting our forecaster Brett Kobernik down on the Skyline. Of equal importance is whether these skiffs of new snow will gently preserve the surface weaknesses we've developed over the past few days. This may cause headaches for our snowpack down the road.

For today, we'll have mostly cloudy to overcast skies, increasing-to-20mph westerly winds along the ridgetops, and mountain temps in the upper 30s.