‘We’re battling the mountain.’ Debris flows and snow test Utah canyons
In his tenure as supervisor over the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, Dave Whittekiend has been tumbled into a new reality rife with challenges that are not on the playbook for managing forests.
“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.”
The trails are muddy, there is debris everywhere and Whittekiend urges caution as people naturally want to head to the canyons to escape the summer heat.
“As far as natural damage, be aware of your surroundings. There’s still a lot of water coming off and in a lot of the streams there could be downed logs and downed trees. You know, be cautious as you’re going around those things and it may not be all that great. Just really pay attention to the conditions that are out on the ground.”
Tanners Flat Campground in Little Cottonwood Canyon took a particularly hard hit. A bathroom was wiped out. There are downed trees everywhere.
Utah Department of Transportation spokesman John Gleason said the situation was dire at Little Cottonwood.
“Ninety-eight avalanches hit the road throughout the winter season and 62 of those slides were big enough to bury a vehicle or destroy a wood frame house.”
It’s been grim.
“There’s only so much that you can do when we were getting as much snow and as many storms as we had. We were seeing slides triggering in areas that hadn’t run in nearly 30 years,” Gleason said.
To help, Whittekiend said the Forest Service is asking for volunteers to mitigate the damage and try to restore the canyons to their natural state as much as possible.
“We are accepting volunteers to go out. We would ask that they check with the Forest Service office. And before they just go out and start doing work on the forest, we need some oversight on that,” he said. “But we’re assembling projects that volunteers could work on. We’ve also had a very successful adopt the trail program in the forest in the past and if there are people who want to adopt a trail and do a lot of maintenance work.”
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.
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Whittekiend stressed the most important virtue at this time is patience.
“We know that there is damage out there. We have not been able to fix some of it yet. And there will be a time lag. We can’t get to everything all at once,” he said.
“As they’re getting out, well before they go out, be certain to check our website. We’re working pretty hard to keep it up to date, as far as conditions out in the forest,” he said.
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.
“We were seeing those slides happen this year in areas that they hadn’t experienced those (type of) slides in decades,” Gleason said. “And so to see that I mean, some of our crews said that they felt like they were going to battle with the mountain.”
