TODAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY. PATCHY FOG IN THE MORNING. SCATTERED RAIN SHOWERS. HIGHS AROUND 40. SOUTHEAST WIND 5 TO 15 MPH.

TONIGHT...RAIN LIKELY. SNOW LEVEL 1000 FEET. LOWS AROUND 34.
SOUTHEAST WIND 5 TO 15 MPH.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR DAY...RAIN LIKELY. SNOW LEVEL 1400 FEET IN THE MORNING. HIGHS AROUND 40. SOUTHEAST WIND 10 MPH.

Our week of warm temps and heavy rain produced the largest natural avalanche cycle of the season this week. The snowpack has now had a chance to consolidate and settle a bit, bringing our danger level back down to LOW.

Yesterday afternoon temps started to dip below freezing again in the start zones, and any precip today will likely fall as snow there, however, amounts should be low.

The little bit of new snow will come with significant winds but the larger avalanche problem at the moment is small wet slides that entrain a fair amount of iso-thermic snow in lower elevations.

These are unlikely to be large scale slides and shouldn't come near buildings or roads. Though any that do occur will be heavy, wet, and have a \"bull dozer\" effect. Hazard for these rises if we start to see more than a little bit of rain again.

WET SNOW AVALANCHES

Most avalanche professionals make a hard distinction between dry snow and wet snow avalanches because they are such different beasts. They are caused by different processes, they fail and fracture differently, they are triggered differently and they move differently down the slope.

Really, there is a continuum between wet and dry avalanches and professional workers use the words: dry, damp, moist, wet and saturated to describe the continuum. Wet avalanches cause relatively few avalanche fatalities, consequently, they are studied less and are not as well understood.

Where Dry Avalanches are caused by putting too much additional stress on the snowpack; Wet Avalanches are caused by decreasing the strength of the snowpack

Dry Avalanche fatalities are triggered by the victims or someone in the victim?s party in 90 percent of cases. Wet Avalanches are difficult for people to trigger, and so, most accidents are from natural slides.

The weather that creates Dry Avalanches is usually loading of wind drifted snow or loading of new snow. While for Wet Avalanches it is most often rain, prolonged melting by sun or very warm temperatures.

Where Dry Avalanches are fast (80 mph or so) usually with a powder cloud (which can reach 200 mph); Wet Avalanches are slower (10-40 mph) like concrete and usually without any powder cloud. While not quick or flashy Wet Avalanches tend to move more earth and snap trees even with smaller size slides.