Northern Madison

The Yellowstone Base Area weather station is located at elevation 7300 ft. The site measures air temp, relative humidity, snow accumulations, and snow water content. Wind speed and direction are measured on tower 2 of the Lodge Lift. The 24 hr snow sensor is swept clear each day.

Click here to see the raw weather data.

The American Spirit site measures air temperture, relative humidity, and wind at an elevation of 8850 feet. In addition, the site measures incoming long and short wave radiation. Click here if data have not updated recently.

The Andesite weather station is located on top of Andesite Mt at elevation 8850 ft. The site measures air temp, snow accumlations, and snow water content. Wind speed and direction are measured on tower 19 of the Meadow Lift. The 24 hr snow sensor is swept clear each day.

Click HERE if the data below hasn't updated.

The Timberline Study Plot is located at elevation 9400 ft. The site provides measurements of air temp, relative humidity, snow accumlations, and snow water content. Wind speed and direction are measured at the top of the Pioneer Ridge (RIDGE, 9800 ft). The 24 hr snow sensor is swept clear each day. Click here if data have not updated recently. Original data file.

On 5/4/24 Skiers triggered large wet loose slides on the Fin near Cooke City

We toured into beehive today starting at around 7:30 AM. We found about 2-4" of fresh wet and heavy snow. Lightly snowing all day until we left around 12 when the snow picked up a bit. Passing fog in and out all day. Around 9400' we dug a pit to the ground (east facing). ~95cm deep. We found about 5" of thick snow from the last two days, on top of a thin layer of graupel and ~4" of very wet snow that had not refrozen from the previous warm-up. The rest of the snowpack was also wet to the ground, but not to the same extent that the upper couple of inches were. Near the ground was definitely a weaker structure, but was also now saturated and closer to "corn snow" than anything. Also noted an ice layer about half way though the snow pack. 

In our pit we got cracking in the new snow (ECTN9) and in the top (8-9" down) of the saturated snow pack (ECTN18), but no propagation. A shovel shear test revealed our two layers being about 8-9" down at the bottom of the very wet layer, and at the interface with the ice layer halfway down. No collapses were observed. No avalanches were observed. We got some sluff while we were skiing, but only when skiing/hop turning aggressively. We chose to ski some steep and short couloirs.

The skin track had decent coverage besides a few spots in the trees. It was rain mixed with snow in the parking lot around 12:45, which quickly turned to rain as we drove towards big sky.

When setting out to Beehive Basin today we only imagined wanting to bail if rain line was at the trailhead, but had not expected our seasons long standing PWL to turn us around. With a few inches of snow at the trailhead and temps just at freezing we set out. The new snow yesterday/last night capped a warm snowpack, keeping the snowpack from freezing at all (no crusts or other signs of superficial freezes up to 9,200ft where we bailed despite the mid-20’s temps recorded overnight). Almost immediately out of the trailhead we got thunderous collapses so big we at first thought it was noise from control work at Big Sky. Further along we got collapses extending hundreds of feet out, valley wide and echoing up the basin. We dug to the bottom out of curiosity and found a saturated and unfrozen snowpack. The bottom 30cm was still all facets, giving the appearance that the remaining 90-110cm of consolidated snowpack was floating on air. We’re assuming the whumps/collapses are traveling along this layer of basal facets.