Snow pack

I live in Boise and under normal conditions this time of year, the foothills surrounding Boise are covered with snow. Not this year. It's often been in the 40s, in December and January so far. And that led me to call David Hekima from the Idaho Department of Water Resources, I have to believe that this year so far is a disaster in the making. Is that correct? Speaker2: It depends on where you're at. For most of the West it is a disaster. It's mainly because we're facing the warmest winter on record. All that warmth in the West is resulting in the snowpack starting somewhere between 6500 and 7500ft in elevation. If you're in a basin like the upper snake River basin, where a good portion of that basin is above 6500ft, or the big loss basin. If you're in the Boise Basin, where most of the basin is below that transition elevation, we're facing pretty dire conditions. If you look at the Henrys Fork, the Henrys Fork tends to be a little lower than the upper snake. You have to look at the snowtel sites and kind of look at that basin elevation. If a good portion of the basin is below 7500 to 6500ft, a little bit of variance across the state. Situations are really rough on the basin in southwestern Idaho. Almost every snowtel site setting a record low and as a low elevation basin, they're in terrible, terrible shape. Speaker1: We need to get snow in February.