i live in a neighborhood that, because of it's topography, captures a lot of cloud action, blowing from the west, which is over the great salt lake, and that's why we get a huge amount of lake effect snow.
here's a google map of my neighborhood (mt. olympus) , i live a couple of blocks northeast of churchill jr high school....
https://maps.google.com/m...&mra=prev&z=15 if you zoom out, and look just due south of olympus cove, you'll see two roads going up into the mountains, big and little cottonwood canyon...
Brighton and Solitude ski resort is up big cottonwood canyon, and Alta and Snowbird (where i go) is up little cottonwood canyon.
these are 'box canyons', which means they dead-end... and are at about 11,000' elevation.what happens is, the clouds march across the desert, hit the great salt lake, pick up all that moisture from evaporation, wrench out as much snowfall as it can at the end of these canyons...
the water content is about 4-6%, which is referred to as 'cold smoke'.
i'm about a 15 minute drive from solitude, another 10 minutes to get to alta
post edited by batsbrew - 2012/11/12 14:01:28