‘We’re battling the mountain.’ Debris flows and snow test #Utah canyons: Saturated soils, #snowpack deliver a cleanup mess for authorities — The Deseret News

Types of landslide movement.

Click the link to read the article on The Deseret News website (Amy Joi O’Donoghue). Here’s an excerpt:

“I’ve been here for 11 years now and I have not seen anything like this in that amount of time. This has been one of the biggest snow years we have had. We’ve had localized issues and runoff issues.” — Dave Whittekiend

[…]

Tanners Flat Campground in Little Cottonwood Canyon took a particularly hard hit. A bathroom was wiped out. There are downed trees everywhere…Greg McDonald, senior geologist with the Utah Geological Survey, said a debris flow closed the road in Little Cottonwood Canyon six weeks ago. It caused substantial damage, only to be followed by another one a couple of weeks later. The sloughing off of a mountainside is because of overly saturated soils that simply give way to the movement of the ground…

West snowpack basin-filled map April 16, 2023 via the NRCS.

The winter has spoken. Record snowpack. Elevated Great Salt Lake levels. Landslides and over-the-top records for stream flows. Raging rivers and streams and yet more to come. Anyone in the business of hydrology, meteorology, geology, water supply and public safety knows it is a fickle game, from year to year.

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