To shoe or not to shoe?

As I sit here on a snowy Idaho Falls Sunday morning, my thoughts turn to snow shoeing.  We both love stomping around in the snow.  It's delightful fun.  Note on the left side of your screen the embedded Twitter account.  (You can click on this embed to see a lot more of the recent Tweets.)  I am using this Twitter mostly to throw up some shortened links to various data sites from Arizona.  Eventually (perhaps) I will create some way to organize them and make them all more accessible.  For now, it's the best I can do.

Anyway, I have been looking at the snowpack down on the Rimlands.  It's a great snowpack.  What strikes me is that the snow is consolidating.  It's water content (called "snow water equivalent" SWE) is remaining essentially steady while the depth of snow itself is shrinking.  At Happy Jack, for example, the snow has shrunk 15% while the SWE has remained nearly unchanged.  If this trend continues, teh snow will turn brick hard on the surface crust.  Such a snowpack could be a real treat for snowshoeing.  The shoes would prevent "postholing" into the deep snow below the crust but the crust would make for easy walking without having to break trail through deep powder or new snow.

I remember one such winter in Flagstaff back in the mid-1980's.  Late in the season--March, as I recall, we were able to go out on Highway 180 and goof off in the aspens.  We skied at will blissfully anywhere we wished without having to worry about breaking trail.  The snow crust was slicker than snot, of course, and you dared not step on the snow with a cross country ski boot.  It was some of the most fun I can recall goofing off in the snow in the mid-1980's.

Hum...well, those memories and today's snowpack data have me wondering and pondering whether to take our snow shoe rigging down to Arizona.  I am sure we are going to be watching this data much more closely than normal as the weeks ahead unfold.  It could be a real unique opportunity.  We shall see!