Winter storm watch puts 10 to 15 inches on the San Juans
The watch covers the northwestern and southwestern San Juan Mountains above 10,000 feet from Sunday morning through noon Monday, with gusts to 40 mph. The valley floor is not in it.
The National Weather Service office in Grand Junction has a winter storm watch out for the mountains east of Cortez, on top of the flood watch covering the valley.
The watch was issued Friday at 12:22 p.m. and runs until noon Monday. “Heavy snow possible above 10,000 feet,” it says. “Total snow accumulations between 10 to 15 inches with locally higher amounts possible. Winds could gust as high as 40 mph.” The timing it gives is from Sunday morning through noon Monday, and the one impact it names is that travel “could be very difficult.”
The two forecast zones in the watch are the Northwest San Juan Mountains and the Southwest San Juan Mountains. That is high ground — the second of those zones reaches into the eastern edge of Montezuma County, but Cortez, Dolores, Mancos and the valley floor are not in it, and the 10,000-foot floor in the bulletin puts the snow well above anywhere people live in the county. What it does cover is the passes: anyone driving CO 145 over Lizard Head or heading for Telluride, Silverton or Ouray on Sunday or Monday morning is driving into it.
A watch is the middle rung of the weather service’s three-step ladder. It means the conditions are possible, not that they have been forecast for a named place; a warning would mean heavy snow is happening or about to. Friday’s bulletin is an update to a watch the office had already issued for the same storm, so the hazard is not new — the figures are the current ones.
The advice in the bulletin is plain: “Slow down and use caution while traveling.” It points drivers to 511 for road conditions.
The same storm is what the flood watch is about. That bulletin, reissued Friday afternoon, expects 1 to 3 inches of rain across southwest Colorado and southeast Utah from Sunday morning through Monday morning, falling on ground still saturated from last week’s flooding. Snow above 10,000 feet and rain below it is the usual split for a late-October system here.
Active watches and warnings for the county are on the weather service’s alerts page, the Grand Junction office’s forecast is at weather.gov/gjt, and road conditions are at cotrip.org.