The National Weather Service Forecasts-

RAIN RAIN RAIN

TODAY...RAIN. HIGHS AROUND 49. SOUTHEAST WIND 5 TO 15 MPH
INCREASING TO 10 TO 20 MPH IN THE AFTERNOON.

TONIGHT...RAIN...HEAVY AT TIMES. LOWS AROUND 44. SOUTHEAST WIND 15 TO 25 MPH.

SATURDAY...RAIN. HIGHS AROUND 50. SOUTHEAST WIND 15 TO 25 MPH.

The forecast calls for about .28\" of rain until 5pm today. Between 5pm tonight and 5am tomorrow the forecast calls for 1.53\" of precip. Between 5am tomorrow and 5pm tomorrow the forecast calls for as much as another 1.09\". From 5pm tomorrow until 5am sunday morning were looking at another .56\" forecast. Thats 3.36\" of precip in our local mountain regions over the next 48 hours. This is a critical loading rate that will rapidly stress the snowpack and with warm temperatures it will also erode the bonds in the snow.

Avalanche danger is Moderate this morning. As this rain starts in and the rates increase danger levels will rise. Expect to see CONSIDERABLE avalanche danger overnight.

Natural avalanches possible. Human triggered avalanches are also possible.

Expect to see areas with fewer anchors cleaning themselves off. Areas of steep rock will dump snow.

These will be wet avalanches moving slowly. They have the ability to entrain all the rotten snow below them with them. Due to high liquid volumes they could potentially run out onto lower angle slopes.

Its a good weekend to be a duck... or catch a jet to Hawaii...

Be careful out there folks and enjoy (as much as you can) a rainy weekend.

Wet Avalanches:

Most avalanche professionals make a hard separation between wet snow avalanches and dry snow avalanches, because wet and dry avalanches are so different. You forecast for wet and dry avalanches very differently, much of the mechanics are different, they move differently, and it's only natural for us to think of them as two separate beasts altogether. But really, there?s a continuum between wet and dry avalanches. For instance, there are damp avalanches, and often, large, dry avalanches start out dry and end up wet by the time they get to the bottom because either the energy of the descent heats the snow up or they travel into a region of warmer snow. Like dry snow avalanches, wet avalanches can occur as both sluffs and slabs.

Wet avalanches usually occur when warm air temperatures, sun or rain cause water to percolate through the snowpack and decrease the strength of the snow, or in some cases, change the mechanical properties of the snow. Once initiated, wet snow tends to travel much more slowly than dry snow avalanches--like a thousand concrete trucks dumping their load at once instead of the hovercraft-like movement of a dry avalanche. A typical wet avalanche travels around 15 to 30 km/hr (10 or 20 mph) while a typical dry snow avalanche travels 100 to130 km/hr (60 or 80 mph)--big difference. Wet slides are also harder for a person to trigger than a dry slide. Because of these two facts, wet avalanches don?t account for nearly as many avalanche fatalities as dry snow avalanches. But they?re certainly not insignificant. They still account for a sizeable percentage of avalanche fatalities in maritime climates, especially to climbers. Wet slides can also do quite a bit of damage to property or to forests and often cause significant hazards on highways.

Slush Avalanches:

An oddity in most of the avalanche world, slush avalanches usually occur in very northern latitudes such as the Brooks Range of Alaska or in northern Norway. They're unusual because they occur on very gentle slopes compared with other avalanches, typically 5-20 degrees and they rarely occur on slopes steeper than 25 degrees. A typical slush avalanche occurs in impermeable permafrost soil, which allows water to pool up, and occurs during rapid saturation of a thin, weak snowpack. When water saturates the snowpack, it catastrophically looses its strength and the resulting slush often runs long distances on very gentle terrain. Once again, very few people are killed by slush avalanches possibly because so few people live in high latitude permafrost mountains. But they can certainly be dangerous to people camped in the wrong spot or structures built in the wrong locations.