OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – At about 128% of normal, snowpack in the Olympic Mountains is looking pretty good for this time of year. But according to a local scientist who measures snow for a living, it’s still too early to get excited.
Bill Baccus, Physical Scientist at Olympic National Park, has just completed his mid-winter survey of the snowpack.
“We got off to a, you know, pretty poor start with those dry conditions in December and November. January though was great. It was a little cooler than normal and we had some nice cool and wet storms. So they really helped us build up that snow pack. And so this is really the first of the surveys for the year. And the most important ones are going to be our April first snow survey because traditionally in the Olympics, about April 15th is about the highest point of the snowpack. So it’s really not until early April that we have an idea of kind of what’s going to be projected out into the summers.”
Baccus says snow surveys have been conducted here for 70 years. He says that while new technology is in play, some of the work he does hasn’t changed at all.
“Like I am going up, for instance, we have a snow course at Deer Park, and we have one on the the old Wolf Creek Road, just off of hurricane Ridge, for instance. And I’m still skiing in, just like a ranger snow shoer skied in back in, you know, 1949. And I’m using the same exact method, I’m standing in the same exact spot using basically the same instruments. So it’s a really nice record because it’s measured the same exact way in the same exact spot. There’s very little change that has occurred.”
That’s important, Baccus says, because it lets scientists study long-term trends with consistent data.
“And when we do look at those snow courses in the data from that, you see a pretty profound downward trend indicating that as our temperatures have warmed, you know, ever so slightly, you know, it is having a pretty profound effect on our snowpack. And so, you know, we really are quite susceptible to a pretty major shift in the amount of snow we see and I think that’s probably what we’re seeing already.”
Baccus reports Hurricane Ridge currently has about a 7-foot-deep snowpack, and Deer Park has 4-feet.
(Photo: Hurricane Ridge parking lot in January.)