12/29/22 Thursday 8:10 am

I have not yet caught up on emails and it may take a while. Yesterday’s outages put me behind. Snow will continue across northern portions of the forecast area before subsiding this morning. Later today, snow showers are expected to redevelop across the entire forecast area. The snow should continue into the day on Friday before s a lull. Then another system moves in late Friday into Saturday, then Saturday night through Monday… Do you see where I am going with this? The switch to winter has definitely been turned on.

I know there are a lot of people who are planning on going over Wolf Creek in the coming days. For those of you who fear winter driving conditions, I do not have good news for you. Wolf Creek was slightly behind some of the totals for the other areas yesterday, but that has changed.

The storm total so far is 16 inches up there and it is still snowing. Based on the weather models I have looked at, I am not sure that it will ever stop snowing during this storm cycle. There could be periods of lighter snow between the periods of heavy snow. CDOT will likely choose the periods of lighter snow to close for maintenance operations. I will try to find out more about this for my afternoon update. All said and done 3 to 4 additional feet will likely fall at Wolf Creek by next Tuesday morning.

It looks like the snow has stopped for a while at Purgatory, they are leading the pack so far with 20 inches. Telluride is up to 12 inches and as I mentioned 16 at Wolf Creek. As far as other totals go, I don’t know if I will have time to compile a list, but here at DWG HQ in Durango West 2, we ended up with 15 inches total. This does not account for what melted yesterday. We had 6 inches last night that I have to remove this morning. There were widespread reports of 6 to 10-inch totals across the lower elevations with roughly 4 inches of that coming last night.

My number one concern is travel over the passes for the next 5 days. Storm cycles have a cumulative effect on driving conditions. Most of the snow yesterday was dense. Last night, later today, and tomorrow the snow will be powdery. By Saturday, some models are showing a return to dense snow. That makes for very dangerous avalanche conditions.

My next update will be early afternoon. Thanks for following and supporting the site!

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