This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
This weekend's Utah forecast could have been penned by John J. Geddes, who celebrated "freshly cut Christmas trees smelling of stars and snow and pine resin."
That will be true, though, only if you trek into the northern and central mountains to "inhale deeply and fill your soul with wintry night," as the Canadian novelist advises. The National Weather Service says while snow, sometimes heavy, will blanket the peaks, the state's urban valleys will mostly settle for rain Saturday and Sunday.
Indeed, forecasters issued a Winter Storm Watch for the Wasatch, western Uintas and Book Cliffs mountain ranges beginning Saturday evening and running through Monday afternoon. From 10 to 20 inches of snow is expected to fall, with locally heavier totals possible.
Lower elevations, though, will have to settle for a relatively few snowflakes and a lot of rain. Along the Wasatch Front temperatures will stay in the low- to mid-40s Saturday under cloudy skies with precipitation expected in the evening — a mirror forecast of that for Friday.
Southern Utahns will escape the rain and snow, though cloudy skies and high temperatures in the low- to mid-50s will prevail.
As of Friday, the Utah Division of Air Quality was forecasting continued compromised breathing conditons for the state's urban valleys, putting them under "yellow" flags. However, the storms could alleviate those conditions as the weekend progresses.
The Utah Avalanche Center rated the risk for potentially deadly mountain snowslides beginning Friday as "moderate" for all monitoring areas except for the Logan mountains, which earned a "low" risk grade.
For more extensive forecast information, visit The Tribune's weather page at: http://www.sltrib.com/weather.
Twitter: @remims