This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
After a series of storms that downed power lines, turned freeways into skating rinks and triggered hundreds of crashes and slideoffs, most of Utah looked toward more springlike weather as the weekend approached.
But not eastern Utah, where the National Weather Service had a Winter Storm Warning in effect Wednesday through Saturday morning. The impact of a cold front shifting east toward Wyoming was expected to include gusty winds and heavy snow, especially in the eastern Uinta Mountains.
Snow accumulations were expected to near a foot as winds, gusting to 45 mph, heralded sub-freezing temperatures through the region.
A Winter Weather Advisory covering the Wasatch Plateau, Book Cliffs and central and southern mountains was to expire at 5 p.m. Thursday. Snow accumulations of up to a half foot were forecast.
The Utah Avalanche Center, meantime, warned that the recent storms had elevated the risk of backcountry snowslides.
The wintry grip still held, too, along the Cache Valley and northern Wasatch Front's higher elevations, as well as the western Uinta Basin, Sanpete and Sevier valleys and San Rafael Swell areas. Forecasters had issued a Freeze Warning for those areas, expiring at 9 a.m. Thursday.
That warning included the Salt Lake and Tooele valleys, where isolated rain and snow showers tapered off Thursday ahead of clearing skies Friday. High temperatures both days were to range into the upper-30s to low-40s.
Southern Utahns essentially waived as the cold front passed them by. High temperatures on Friday under sunny skies were predicted to reach the low-70s in Utah's Dixie, up about 5 degrees from partly cloudy Thursday. Both days were to be breezy.
The Utah Division of Air Quality gave its "green" grades to all monitoring stations, indicating healthy breathing conditions.
The Intermountain Allergy & Asthma website pollen index as of Thursday noted that mulberry and oak allergens were "very high," while maple and sycamore were "high" and birch "moderate."
For more extensive forecast information, visit the Tribune's weather page at http://www.sltrib.com/weather.
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