Today's strong sunshine and warm temperatures will make the snow surface wet, but it will take a little longer than yesterday since an ice crust on the snow surface from last night's refreeze will have to melt first. As the day heats up, wet avalanches of loose snow will become possible. These wet snow avalanches will mainly involve the new snow that fell Friday/Saturday.

Pay attention to the snow becoming wet, then look for balls of snow rolling downhill and growing in size and occurring more frequently. Seeing these clues will tell you that loose wet avalanches may start happening. They tend to happen more near exposed rocks that absorb heat from the sun and help warm the snow faster.

Dry powder can still be found on north-facing slopes, but assess the snow in the upper 24 inches of the snowpack. Soft slab avalanches of the new snow are possible as seen in avalanche activity on Sunday noted above in the Recent Avalanches section. Although those slides happned further south, I suspect similar conditions exist in the Ogden area mountains.

On some slopes there may be some very small, weak facets under the new snow. I found small facets under the new snow on a south facing slope in the Uintas on Sunday and wouldn't be surprised to find them in a few other places today. What this means is that the new snow may have a good bond on some slopes while it will not have a good bond on others if these small facets exist. I don't expect this avalanche problem to be long lasting or widespread with this week's warm sunny weather.

Unfortunately, there is still a small chance that avalanches could break near the ground on a persistent weak layer of old faceted snow that caused many avalanches about two weeks ago. In many places in the upper Cottonwood Canyons, this weak layer is buried so deeply that it will be nearly impossible to trigger an avalanche on it. In places with a thinner snowpack (maybe less deep than a ski pole), a rider can still impact this layer, but it has had about 2 weeks to adjust to the load of heavy snow from the Valentine's storms and triggering avalanches on it is not impossible but unlikely.

One complicating factor - Many slopes produced big avalanches two weeks ago and will have maybe 2-3 feet of snow on top of the bed surface. We haven't heard of any avalanches repeating on these slopes, but I would be hesitant to totally trust them without doing a thorough assessment which could be difficult because the only way to examine the snowpack on these slopes will be to go into the avalanche starting zone.

When will this layer heal or go away? Good question. Read Daniel Turner's thoughts about it HERE.