My last year of snow surveys – 40 some years ago – was, in some ways, the hardest one. Jay Penney was out on medical leave with congestive heart failure, Tom Engel had transferred to Phoenix, and I was handling both the Flathead and Kootenai drainages with help from the Forest Service. I can’t say enough good about those guys – over six months, I’d meet a new sidekick daily, few that I’d work with twice, and only one screwed up a snowmobile – and I could still drive it out without a ski (the old Alpines had only one ski, and it didn’t take much of a blunder in reverse to break it off).
In April I could confidently comment on the status of the snowpack. Then, telemetry was new. Today, we have a website and the graph does a good job of showing how the snowpack data gets a lot more solid at the end of March.
This next graph does a great job of showing why the measurements are in snow-water equivalents instead of just the depth of snow. The green peaks show individual snow storms, and how quickly the snow settles from the fluffy snowflakes.
So where are we? As of 04/03/21, these are the numbers.
| Snow Water | Percent of Average | |
| Stahl Peak | 27.0 inches | 78 % |
| Grave Creek | 11.2 inches | 81 % |
| Banfield Mountain | 13.7 inches | 77 % |
| Hawkins Lake | 20.8 inches | 84 % |
| Garver Creek | 8.8 inches | 96 % |
| Poorman Creek | 29.5 inches | 83 % |
If I were running the numbers, I’d say we’re on the light side of normal – but it isn’t my call. It is interesting to note that none of my measurements are left in the 30-year average.
Trego's Mountain Ear 