Durango residents awoke to several inches of snow on Wednesday and Thursday mornings – and should expect more throughout the weekend.
The storm arrived Tuesday evening, blanketing higher elevations with snow and saturating the valleys with rain before temperatures dropped just below freezing around midnight. Community observations in Durango reported between 2 and 6 inches of snow on Wednesday and another 4 inches by Thursday morning. Purgatory Resort received 28 inches as of Thursday.
The deep atmospheric river brought both relatively warm temperatures and high levels of moisture to the region.
“We’re looking at like 350% to 450% of what’s normal for this time of the year,” said Norv Larson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Grand Junction.
Looking into the weekend, NWS Meteorologist Megan Stackhouse said another wave train of weather systems will be moving in from the Pacific. She said a weak system should arrive Friday morning, with the bulk of the weather hitting the Southwest region by Friday evening.
“We’re just going to have a lot of snow and precipitation across the area,” she said. “The system really doesn’t move out until the Monday, late Monday (or) Tuesday timeframe.”
Predicting the precise freezing elevation can be difficult with these storms because of the warm temperatures they bring. The NWS office received some reports Wednesday from the Eastern Uinta Basin in Utah and northwest corner of Colorado of freezing rain, which Larson said could have been because of rain that froze upon contact with surfaces previously cooled by entrenched cold air in those regions.
The snow that arrived Wednesday night was lighter and drier than the precipitation the night before because of colder air that moved in at the tail-end of the mid-week storm. Stackhouse said she expects the weekend weather precipitation to be similarly light.
Temperatures in Durango and Cortez are expected to sit around 40 degrees over the weekend, meaning precipitation may turn to rain before snow starts up again overnight.
Stackhouse predicts the next storm will bring similar snow accumulation over the weekend, with amounts ranging from several inches in the valleys to 1 to 2 feet in the San Juan Mountains.
As expected, avalanche conditions in the region jumped from a “moderate” danger level to “considerable” with the forecast issued by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center on Wednesday afternoon. The danger remains considerable at all elevations and storm slabs are possible on all aspects through at least Thursday. Backcountry recreationalists should be mindful of wet, heavy slabs of snow that accumulated during the storm. Avalanches are likely to release and slide on one of two persistent weak layers of snow that remain from either early October snow or the dry period the occurred toward the end of November and early December.
Colorado had its first avalanche fatality of the season on Dec. 26 when one of two snowboarders caught in a slide near Berthoud Pass died.
Larson said that residents of the Southwest region should expect “kind of an unsettled pattern going into the new year.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
