Backcountry avalanche warning issued

The Western News

The U.S. Forest Service’s Glacier Country Avalanche Center on Jan. 2 issued a special backcountry warning for Kootenai National Forest along with Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park.

The center’s Stan Bones said that heavy snowfall led to a warning of high avalanche danger in those areas of northwestern Montana.

“The new snowfall over the last week has begun to completely bury the vegetative and terrain anchors that were widely existing earlier,” Bones said in a press release. “The new snowfall is building a more consolidated, dense, slab layer which is now sitting atop the weakly bonded and lower density snow received earlier in December.”

In addition, new snowfall from this past Wednesday was accompanied by strong winds in many locations, Bones added.

“Conditions have combined to produce an unstable, inverted snowpack with higher density surface snow over-topping less dense, more weakly bonded buried snow,” he said. “Because of heavy new snowfall, often combined by ridge and mountaintop winds, unstable slab layers are likely on steep, open terrain in all of the mountainous areas of northwestern Montana.”

The center said that both natural and human-triggered avalanches are likely and called avalanche conditions “very dangerous.”

The Glacier Country Avalanche Center expected to update the advisory on Tuesday of this week.

For more information, call Bones at 406-758-5284.