Winter shift frustrates Flathead residents
A dramatic change in the weather had Flathead residents scrambling last week to prevent collapsing roofs, restore power and dig themselves out of deep, heavy snow.
Warm weather and rain on Jan. 7 created slick roads, frozen potholes and other driving hazards, and the National Weather Service issued a flood advisory for the Flathead and surrounding counties.
About 350 Flathead Electric Cooperative customers in Happy Valley were without power part of the day. The outage was worse near Libby, where 600 customers were affected. Heavy snow dragged branches down on power lines across Whitefish, causing trees to catch on fire in three places, and Olney Bissell School was closed for the day.
The Montana Department of Transportation issued an advisory that day for travelers on U.S. Highway 2 between West Glacier and East Glacier, where the avalanche hazards were considered serious. Drivers were advised not to stop their vehicles.
Stan Bones, an avalanche forecaster for the Flathead National Forest, issued an advisory that day rating the hazard as high across the mountain ranges of Northwest Montana. The storm system that hit the Flathead on Jan. 5 brought 2.5 inches of water-equivalent snowfall in 51 hours.
Conditions improved by presstime, when Flathead Forest avalanche forecaster Tony Willits downgraded the hazard to moderate. Freezing rain or mist over the weekend had stiffened the snowpack in places.
Freezing rain, however, created rime ice on skiers’ goggles at Whitefish Mountain Resort on Saturday afternoon, where skiing conditions were otherwise surprisingly good. By Sunday, the freezing mist had created a thin layer of ice on soft, packed snow creating what locals called “zipper ice.” The parking lots and lift lines were mostly empty Sunday afternoon.
That was a setback for the resort, which was beginning to see a great snow year after a slow start to the season. More than five feet of snow had fallen on Big Mountain between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
By Jan. 7, before the weather shift, the resort reported a settled base of 81 inches at the summit resulting from 156 inches of accumulated snowfall. The settled base in Big Mountain Village was 50 inches.
“We have gotten so much snow since we opened that we are now pretty much even with the record-setting snowfall we saw last year,” resort spokesman Donnie Clapp said in a Jan. 7 press release.
Statewide, snowpack levels are still below average and slightly below last year’s, according to Roy Kaiser, of the Natural Resources and Conservation Service.
West of the Divide, mountain snow-water content is about 81 percent of average and 89 percent of last year, he said. The forecast is for stream flows west of the Divide to average between 76 and 89 percent of the historical average.
In the Flathead drainage, the snowpack is about 74 percent of average and 88 percent of last year’s level. The stream flow forecast for April through July in the Flathead is 68-82 percent of average and 76 to 84 percent of last year’s levels.