Regional snowpack well above norm

LOOKOUT PASS, Idaho – “Whoa, baby!” exclaimed Patrick Maher, as deep powder threatened to swallow his snow measuring gauge.

The gauge – a hollow pole – hit bottom at 9 feet, 1 inch. At a remote monitoring spot high in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains, the snow was 3 feet deeper than the 30-year average before Friday’s storm hit. Water content in the snow was 124 percent of normal.

Maher and colleague Steve Esch spent the day measuring one of the better snowpacks in recent years. The two Avista Utilities employees are part of a vast network that fanned out across the Columbia River basin to record the data by April 1.

That’s when high-elevation snowpacks typically hit their peak.

“We might get more snow beyond that, but it doesn’t add to the big picture,” said Scott Pattee, water supply specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Mount Vernon, Wash. “The rest is lost to evaporation.”

In the Northwest, mountain snow is king. High-elevation runoff waters crops; generates power; flushes juvenile salmon out to the ocean; and makes whitewater rafting trips possible.

How the water year shapes up is “a huge, economic consideration” for the region, Pattee said.

That sends people out in helicopters, snowmobiles and snowshoes each year to check the spring snowpack. They partner with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, which publishes the data.

Avista Utilities gets about 40 percent of its electricity from dams. The company’s employees check several of the 18 monitoring sites in the Spokane River basin.

Maher and Esch drove to an area just east of Lookout Pass, then used snowmobiles and snowshoes to reach a monitoring site at Roland Summit. En route to the 5,120-foot ridge, the guide’s snowmobiles got stuck in loose powder.

“That’s unusual for this time of year,” said Esch, a senior operations engineer.

Even though they made the trip before Friday evening’s storm, 18 inches of fresh snow had blanketed Roland Summit since the site was last checked on March 1. At another monitoring site, the contrast was even more startling.

In recent drought years, only a 6-inch crust of snow remained at that site by April 1. This year, Maher and Esch recorded 9 feet of snow. The metal sign marking the monitoring site was nearly buried.

Roland Summit’s a good gauge for Avista, because it marks the boundary of the Coeur d’Alene and Clark Fork watersheds, said Maher, a senior hydro operations engineer for Avista. The company operates dams in both basins.

“Some of this snow will melt and run off into the Coeur d’Alene River,” he said. “Some of it will flow into the Clark Fork.”

In the Spokane River, the water supply forecast is 126 percent of normal this year. For the Columbia River, measured at The Dalles Dam, the forecast is 103 percent of normal.

People are surprised that the forecast isn’t higher, Pattee said. “We think it should be a huge snowpack, because we’ve had so much low-elevation snow,” he said.

But across the entire Columbia Basin, this year is shaping up to fit the 30-year average, said Pattee, who was measuring snowpack in the Okanogan last week. That’s significant, because the region hasn’t had a normal year for several years.

“As far as the snowpack goes,” Pattee said, “it’s kind of relief to see a year like this one.”