[pct-l] Oregon-Washington Snowpack

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good afternoon, Soul Doctor,

I don’t believe any agency does as good and as thorough a job of monitoring
water resources as California, probably because so much of its economy
depends upon the scarce resource.  It must be monumentally aggravating to
them to know that the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington dumps an
average of 265,000 cu.ft./sec. of fresh water into the ocean.

In the Pacific NW there are a great many highly-detailed local reporting
stations, but they are difficult to visualize into a region.  The closest
I’ve found to a useable snowpack report for the Pacific NW – and all of the
West -- is found at:  http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/cgibin/westsnow.pl

One caution with this site, as well as the Sierra site, is that they show
relative values rather than absolute values; meaning they don’t show
snowpack depth, they only show what it is as a percentage of average.  If a
chart viewer doesn’t have a feel for what the “average” means in terms of
hiking, it’s not so useful to know that this year has 120% of that – or 75%.
For some hikers, 75% of average is still great-gosh-almighty too deep.
http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=264464

Usually the historical percentage charts are viewed with awareness of that
year’s hiker journal reports; for example it’s a good clue if the snowpack
reports show 120% of average, and most of the hikers in that year
continually bitch about walking over it, and wading the rivers.  Similarly,
if the snowpack is 75%, one can expect journals to say the hiking is easy,
the streams are low, and everyone is booking big miles.

Steel-Eye

-Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965

http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye

http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09/


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 11:29 AM, CClark <dr_carolyn at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
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> Thanks for the posting the link to the CA snowpack.  Is there an
> equivalent link for Oregon & Washington?
>
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> <Soul Doctor>
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>