Snowpack remains well above average
Large chunks of snow and ice are shown along the shoreline of the Hungry Horse Reservoir on Friday. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
Shown is the confluence of the North Fork, left, and Middle Fork Flathead Rivers from the area of the Blankenship Bridge on Friday. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
The snows of winter have shrunk to a few gritty roadside banks in most of the Flathead Valley, but Northwest Montana’s high terrain is still buried deeper than normal.
La Niña winters like this one tend to favor greater snow, and readings from the snowpack telemetry network show that local watersheds continue to hold much more moisture than usual for this time of year. The Flathead Basin snowpack is at 137 percent of average, while the Kootenai in far Northwest Montana is at 123 percent.
This shouldn’t surprise residents who have been watching the mountains. Whitefish Mountain Resort has logged some of the deepest snow of any ski resort in the West this season and currently boasts a settled base of 12.5 feet at the summit of Big Mountain. Meanwhile, flyovers of the Sperry Chalet site in Glacier Park have shown its stone walls poking out of snow which could be as deep as 40 feet in places.
A weather station on Flattop Mountain in Glacier shows 133 inches of settled snow, and Noisy Basin in the Swan Mountains has about 147 inches.
In the valley, only about 3.4 inches of snow was recorded in March, below the average of 5.8 inches. However, season-to-date snowfall in Kalispell is at 81.5 inches, still far ahead of the 51-inch average for the end of March.
Ray Nickless, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Missoula, told the Daily Inter Lake on Friday that cool temperatures will likely hold the mountain snowpack together in early April. But eventually, all this snow will have to go somewhere.
“We’ve still got an abundance of snow, and that will certainly provide us with some nice streamflows in the summer,” Nickless said. But that “unfortunately may result in some flood levels being reached in the Flathead.”
On Friday, the Flathead River was 6.35 feet deep at the U.S. Geological Survey monitoring location in Columbia Falls. Flood stage is at 13 feet. At that level, landowners downstream “can expect their agricultural fields ... to be flooded out if Flathead Lake has got a full level. So they’ll see water seeping into their fields,” he said. On Friday, the lake’s surface was at 2,886 feet above sea level. It’s forecast to reach 2,890 feet in May, and typically peaks around 2,893 feet in summer.
Nickless gives the Flathead River an 80 percent chance of reaching flood stage this year. Residents of Spruce Park and Evergreen may be impacted if the river gets above the 13-foot mark, he said.
“How high above that flood stage we go, that’s up to the spring rains.” Those usually come in May and June, too far out to predict, he said.
Nickless recommends that homeowners and landowners along the river prepare for flooding this spring, and that they purchase flood insurance, which typically requires a 30-day waiting period. For more information, visit https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program.
Patrick Reilly can be reached at preilly@dailyinterlake.com, or at 758-4407.