Clearing the North Cascades Pass

[Nobody]

I was curious if the North Cascades Pass was open since we've virtually had no snowfall this year. I checked the wadot website and found a bunch of pictures of opening the pass up on previous years. Talk about a rough day at work! They get paid for this. Where do I sign up!

Crews assessing avalanche conditions. Ohhh look at that perfect snow!




They send in D6 and D8 dozers to clear the massive snow drifts ahead of the snow blowers






Tons more pictures can be found here
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/passes/northcascades

[EBSTEVE]

So is it open?

[Nobody]

Nope... I guess it gets closed regardless.

[built4war]

that would be to much fun i think it would end being a massive race to the top being such a wide road!!! could be interesting!!!!

[Nobody]

They are saying this might be the latest opening of the North Cascades pass in 20 years. They did a scouting run up the pass a couple weeks ago. Another rough day at work, lucky SOB's.

"The snow is up to 60 feet deep in the Liberty Bell avalanche zone."


http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/passes/northcascades

Crews trekked up the snow-covered North Cascades Highway on Thursday, March 17, 2011, and found, well, lots of snow.

Actually, there’s so much snow that we’re expecting the latest reopening of the highway in the last 20 years. We probably won’t be able to start clearing the pass until early to mid-April.

In the Cutthroat Ridge avalanche zones we found snow 5 to 20 feet deep, which is fairly normal.

But in the Liberty Bell avalanche zone we found much, much deeper snow – as deep as 60 feet. Normally, the snow is anywhere from 10 to 50 feet deep.

And at the summit, Washington Pass, we found snow 10 feet deep, which is also deeper than normal. This isn’t an avalanche zone.

There is still snow in the avalanche chutes that will hopefully come down naturally over the next several weeks. If it doesn’t, we may have to blast it out before we can start clearing the highway.

The real kicker is that the forecast is calling for continued heavy snowfall through the last week in March. Given this forecast, we have to keep our snow blowers and avalanche resources focused on Stevens Pass.

We will likely not start the North Cascades reopening effort until early to mid April. If we started too early and the storms materialized, we would find ourselves having to rework the North Cascades