The Wasatch Powderkeg will be held this Friday and Saturday at Brighton as a benefit for the Utah Avalanche Center, featuring a Ski Mountaineering Sprint race on Friday afternoon and a longer race Saturday with Race, recreation, and youth courses and divisions. There will also be Companion Rescue, Terrain Strategies, Splitboarding, Steep Skiing and Riding, and Mountaineering Techniques for Skiers and Snowboarders skills clinics Saturday taught by local pros. There will be a drawing for great gear including boots and winner's choice of skis or a splitboard mid-day Saturday. Details here.

Powder magazine has a companion piece to our Shame and the Social Contract essay from January. Editor Matt Hansen describes the uncomfortable position of reporting an avalanche in Getting Beyond the Emotional Game of Reporting an Avalanche. The take-home: Your reports of avalanche information matter. On this topic, a nod of appreciation to Aaron Rice in describing his incident in the Y-Not couloir a couple days ago...confirming that if you skin up over 2.5 million feet in a year, you're granted nine lives.

Skies are mostly cloudy as high mountain temps struggle, albeit slowly, to rise above the single digits. Trailheads and mid-elevation temperatures are in the mid-teens. The westerly winds kicked it up a notch overnight and are blowing 25-30mph with gusts to 50. Even the low elevation anemometers are gusting into the 30s. Snow surface conditions are a mix of wind and isolated areas of sun-damage along with excellent riding conditions in the more protected terrain. Snow depths up high are just shy of 150" and the low elevation exits have recovered nicely from last month's thaw.

The trend was favorable. Early Monday morning snow and wind produced a few shallow natural wind slabs in heavily loaded areas while ski area control work produced both sensitive and stubborn wind pockets 1-2' in depth. New cornice-fall also produced shallow sluffing and bite-size shallow wind slab along the more exposed ridgelines. By afternoon, however, stability had greatly improved and the snow became much more stubborn and resistant to ski cuts and other provocation.

In general, we'll be under a westerly flow with a warming trend over the next several days. The westerly winds south of I-80 should become a more reasonable 15-20mph by early afternoon. Areas north of I-80 should continue to see moderate to strong winds along and north of the Utah/Idaho border over the next couple of days with more energetic waves passing to the north. Today we'll see partly to mostly cloudy skies and perhaps a trace of snow in the Ogden and Logan area mountains. Ridgetop temps will warm from today's mid-teens to the low 20s tonight...and will trend toward the low 30s by later Thursday.