Maybe fall overslept its alarm. Or it might have run into traffic while taking the polar jet stream across the Pacific Ocean. Whatever the reason, it’s evident the season has been running very late this year.
That’s about to end.
Like a job applicant who’s on the verge of missing an interview, fall is scrambling to get back on schedule this week. Meteorologists are expecting a precipitous drop in temperature Thursday and Friday across the state accompanied by what could be more than a foot of snow in the mountains. And that chill is supposed to stick around, according to Christine Kruse, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service bureau in Salt Lake City.
It’s good news for Utahns looking forward to sweater weather as well as for skiers and snowboarders who had begun to fret that winter might skip the state entirely.
“It looks like, at least from temperatures, that it [will be] a lot closer to what we should normally be for mid- to late October,” Kruse said.
Looking at long-range data from the NWS’s Climate Prediction Center, she added, “I don’t see anything that suggests we’re going to get back up to the 80s and close to 90 again after this cold front.”
Last week, the temperature at the Salt Lake International Airport hit a record high for the month of October. Yet at Brian Head Resort, which in September brazenly pegged Nov. 8 as its ski season opening date, panic had not begun to set in, a spokesperson said.
A base elevation of 9,600 feet — the highest in Utah — has given Brian Head managers some confidence, marketing manager Amber Palmer said. Plus, she said, the balmy weather has given the mountain operations team time to dial in the resort’s snowmaking systems so they’re ready to go when the weather drops.
“The team’s excited,” Palmer said, “because the weather is kind of getting up to speed and being like normal conditions.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) New snow near Albion Basin, on Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024.
The NWS predicts Brian Head could get up to 10 inches of snow between Thursday night and Saturday morning. While high temperatures could climb back up into the low- to mid-50s in the week after that, the low temperatures will settle in the teens and 20s — well within snow-making range.
“That’s our other reassurance for opening earlier in the season,” Palmer said. “We just want to give people the freedom to ski, even if it’s a few runs. That’s better than nothing.”
Closer to Salt Lake City, freezing temperatures are expected to linger around the Cottonwood Canyons resorts for the foreseeable future. That will help their snowmaking efforts, as will what Kruse said could be up to 15 inches of natural snow by Saturday. At times Friday, she said, it may snow at a pace of two inches per hour.
The earliest planned opening date to ski season in the Cottonwoods is Nov. 22 at Alta Ski Area — a prospective date shared by Park City Mountain and Woodward Park City on the Wasatch Back. However, Big Cottonwood Canyon neighbors Brighton and Solitude traditionally compete to be the first to open on the Wasatch Front.
Resorts in Logan, Ogden and Park City, Kruse said, can expect to reap fewer rewards from the storm. She estimated places like Snowbasin and Park City Mountain will get 4 to 8 inches of snow and maybe up to 10.
“They look like they’ll see a little bit less when this event moves through,” she said, “and then they’re not going to see much after that.”
Lower elevations will mostly experience the storm as rain Thursday night through Saturday morning. While some slush could land in the valley Friday, particularly on the eastern shelf, Kruse said it won’t even be enough to whet skiers, snowboarders or even sledders’ appetites.
Fall should be back on schedule as it enters late October, according to NWS models. Whether it can stay that way through November, however, is unclear. Kruse said models give basically equal chances of warmer-than, colder-than and average temperatures for the rest of the season.
