Random Snowiness

So, it's been snowing here every other day, for about three and a half years, give or take.

Or it seems so, anyway. I can't remember a winter in a very long time that we have had this much snow. Being a desert, the national weather service monitors snow pack, and all of Utah is above 100% of normal. It's actually more than 160% in some places. If the spring is late, and the weather warms up fast, it will all come rushing out of the mountains in a big hurry, and with the valleys already pretty wet, there will be no where for that water to go, and the few "rivers" here will overflow. I say rivers in quotes because what passes for a river here is really nothing more than a big stream and a few canals.

We took this picture over the weekend in Park City (those are the Park City Ski Area runs you can see carved into the mountain in the background...). We took it because it shows how much snow there is up there in the mountains. Even the deer have been forced out of the extreme high country.

Anyway, we took a drive into the back country over the weekend to be the surrogate checker-outers of a couple of snowmobiles that a remote friend is thinking about buying. We drove out to the Peoa/Oakley area, and I'm here to tell ya, if you think there's lots of snow here in the immediate Salt Lake area, take a drive up there. We saw one house where the entire covered front porch of a house was collapsed because of the snow - the entire thing was there, in a pile of broken wood and shingles, sitting on the front steps of the house. About 50 yards away, there were people up on the roof of another house, shoveling the snow off. They were standing in three to four feet of snow. On the roof.