64 inches of snow in St. Mary
Chuck Oxley digs shovels snow at the Nite Owl early Monday mroning as a blizzard hit the area. Later in the morning the sun was shining.
A series of storms shot into the Flathead Valley from Friday night to Monday morning creating a rollercoaster of conditions that ended up dumping about 20 inches of snow in Columbia Falls and a whopping 64 inches at St. Mary.
Schools and U.S. Highway 2 were closed Monday as a result of the storm. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and Amtrak temporarily suspended service through the John F. Stevens Canyon because of avalanches and avalanche danger. Train traffic was suspended from Shelby to Whitefish on Monday. Highway 2 was closed from West Glacier to East Glacier. By Tuesday, the road was opened to Essex, but still closed to East Glacier.
Crews from BNSF were set to do avalanche control above the tracks in the John F. Stevens Canyon, under a special permit from Glacier National Park.
The permit allows the use of hand charges, and an avalauncher or other charges delivered by a helicopter during daylight hours. The planned mitigation activity is the use of a DaisyBell, with other charges delivered by a helicopter as a backup. A DaisyBell avalanche mitigation technique uses a cylinder suspended from a helicopter that can be positioned above the snowpack. It uses a small, controlled pressure wave from the sudden combustion of hydrogen to test slab stability or trigger the snow.
Highway 2 reopened from West Glacier to East Glacier on Tuesday.
The first storm Friday night into Saturday morning dumped heavy snow, with 12 to 14 inches in Columbia Falls. But by Sunday, the weather warmed up into the high 30s and it rained on and off until late in the day before turning into all snow by dark.
Blizzard conditions set in, with high east winds and plummeting temperatures. The temperature in Columbia Falls went from 36 to 18 in about an hour and by Monday morning it was 10 degrees with a frigid east wind.
The storm didn’t reach the totals that were expected, because some of it fell as rain rather than snow. The Weather Service was predicted upwards of 24 inches in Columbia Falls. That didn’t happen. On the level, there was about seven inches of new snow.
The east side of the Divide got hammered. St. Mary recorded 64 inches of snow at the ranger station. East Glacier had 51 inches of snow, Browning had three feet and the Blackfeet Tribe declared a state of emergency as it worked to plow out the snow. Many Glacier recorded 49 inches of new snow since Friday.
Along the Rocky Mountain Front as much as five feet of snow fell as well.
By Monday morning in Columbia Falls, the sun was trying to shine.
The rain froze on area roadways and made driving treacherous.
The Izaak Walton Inn in Essex said it received 41 inches of snow.
The Glacier Park webcam at Two Medicine was disappearing under a drift of snow.
This week a warm-up is expected with rain in the valleys and snow in the mountains.