There may be a few days left in summer, but winter sports season is making a fast approach to Utah — as the first snow of the season has arrived at ski resorts in the Cottonwood canyons.
“First snow of the season,” Alta Ski Area posted on X Tuesday, alongside photos of snow-speckled grounds and misty skies.
Snowbird, Alta’s neighbor in Little Cottonwood Canyon, showed fans on its Instagram account Tuesday actively falling snow sticking to a moving ski lift. Both Solitude Mountain Resort and Brighton Resort, in Big Cottonwood Canyon, posted brief videos Tuesday on X of snow falling at their locations.
On the other side of the Wasatch Mountains, Deer Valley and Jupiter Peak at Park City Mountain Resort also reported snow fall Tuesday. And at Snowbasin Resort, in Weber County, a post asked: “A light dusting of snow up top, do we count it?”
Snow fell on northern Utah in areas at or above 9,000 feet, according to Christine Kruse, lead meteorologist with Salt Lake City’s National Weather Service. Last year, Alta reported its first snowfall on Oct. 2.
“Sometimes we have our first snow … even [in] August,” said Kruse. “So it’s not unusual to see accumulated snow at these really high elevations in September.”
In the Salt Lake Valley, rainfall spurts and severe thunderstorm warnings hit much of Tuesday, with temperatures reaching lows of 50 degrees. Showers are expected to continue through the afternoon and diminish by midnight.
It’s too soon to predict the winter season for the valley, Kruse said, but as the cold weather system continues through Utah, temperatures will fall below normal. The average for this time of year is 81 degrees; highs in the 70s are predicted for the rest of this week. Last year, the valley’s first accumulated snowfall arrived on Nov. 23 — which was Thanksgiving.
“Because we saw the snow today, that has [no] predictive value for the way the winter is going to go,” said Kruse. “It’s a little bit too far out to really have any signal about what we could expect for this winter.”
