Haines residents have a new weather tower overlooking them as winter is coming on. KHNS’ Brandon Wilks spoke with Erik Stevens, director, and forecaster for the Haines avalanche center, about the new station.

So what we did this summer, we partnered with the National Resources Conservation Service, their branch of the USDA federal government. And they’ve got a program called SNOTEL. And the SNOTEL group, what they do is they put up these really robust long term snowpack monitoring stations, they have them all over the country. And there’s dozens of them across Alaska, and a few of them in Southeast Alaska. And we already had one that we helped them put up on flower mountain, that was about five or six years ago that was installed. And we were able to convince them to put a second one up on Mount Ripinsky. So what they did was, we flew up via helicopter, and we took down the previous weather stations that the hands avalanche center had installed. And we replaced it with a brand new tower that’s a lot taller and a lot stronger, and new equipment as well. So basically, it was a big operation to replace the current MT Ripinsky weather station with a new, much more robust long term monitoring station. 

Of course that doesn’t mean that our old tower is being put out to pasture just yet.

So we’re going to take the old equipment that we took down from the Ripinsky station, we’re going to rebuild it, repurpose it into a new weather station. And next summer, we’re going to be installing that in a new location. And we haven’t finalized where that location is yet. So we welcome any public input on where to put that. Ideally, it’ll be somewhere near treeline, where we get good weather and snow data in one of the one of our zones where a lot of skiers and snow machiners are going out. But there’s not much data.

Erik noted the strangeness of the current atypical warm weather we’ve experienced this past week but forecasts that normal November weather is returning soon and encourages anyone who might venture out to get educated on some of the dangers. 

Okay, so coming up here in Haines, we’re putting on an avalanche rescue course on December 11. There’s still space open for that one. That’s a one day rescue course. Then we have a level one recreational course that’ll be January 14, and a level two recreational that’ll be February 2. Those are three day courses. So there’s still spots open and all these courses and you can register at Alaska. Avalanche.org