Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the teaser episode of my newest experiment, Snow and Salt, a podcast about the seasonal journey of water and life in Utah’s Wasatch mountains.
Released on the solstices and equinoxes, this podcast is intended to help curious minds tune into seasonal changes occurring in the natural world around them. In each episode, I will visit three locations—one in the Wasatch mountains, one in the Salt Lake Valley, and one along the shores of Great Salt Lake, and discuss what’s happening to the plants, animals, and, of course, the watershed as the seasons shift. I’m your host, Ayja Bounous, award-winning author in Salt Lake City.
I thought the Spring Equinox would be an appropriate day to release this teaser episode, because this day, the halfway mark between the shortest and longest days of the year, is itself a teaser to the brighter and warmer days ahead in the northern hemisphere. The Spring Equinox is celebrated by many cultures around the world as being a time of new beginnings, new growth, and rejuvenation. There is much to celebrate this time of year. The sun lingers later into the evenings and the ground begins to thaw. Color is reintroduced into the valley as early crocuses and tulips poke their bright blooms through the ashen detritus left by autumn and winter. It’s also a time filled with little bursts of wonder as we witness how large that seasonal swing can be between winter and spring. I find that the Spring Equinox carries a feeling of deviousness with it, as one sunny day can be easily eclipsed by a snowstorm here in the Salt Lake Valley, as has been the case these last few weeks. This dichotomy is part of the reason that March can feel so miraculous in the Wasatch.
Though winter is far from over, spring is already making its appearance even in the highest reaches of the mountains. During the winter, the sun tracks so low in the sky that many of the north-facing aspects and deep valleys might not receive direct light. The canyons haven’t seen the sun tracking this high in the sky since September 22nd, 2024, the fall equinox. The intensity of the sun shapes the snowpack, the accumulation of snowfall that season. The top layers of snow crystals melt or evaporate —the hydrogen bonds holding the frozen water molecules together breaking apart from the heat of the sun rays. During this time, all three forms of water—solid, liquid and vapor—can be present on the surface of the snowpack.
As the top layer melts through the porous snow crystals and into the deeper layers, the snowpack compresses and becomes more dense and stable—a sign that the mountains are beginning to transition into spring. The snowpack is in a constant state of change, fluctuating in depth and snow water content depending on the day, and even the hour, a process called snow metamorphism. At 11 pm on March 17th, the night before the most recent storm, the Alta-Guard House weather station, located at 8,799 feet in elevation, registered a snowpack depth of 105 inches. Twenty-four hours later, at 11 pm on March 18th, the snowpack depth had shot up to a depth of 131 inches. By 5 pm on March 19th, after a warm and sunny day, snowpack depth had already dropped down to 121 inches.
Below the snow, some animals, like the yellow-bellied marmot, will continue to hibernate into April and May. Others, like the pika, have spent the winter being active, creating tunnels through the snowpack. A healthy snowpack is essential for pikas, who, despite living in extreme environments, are very sensitive to extreme temperatures. A thick snowpack keeps the pikas insulated, while a thin snowpack allows freezing temperatures to infiltrate their dens. March is the start of their breeding season in lower elevations, so if you hike or ski in the mountains this week, there could be a colony of pikas 100 inches beneath you getting jiggy with it.
The Salt Lake Valley valley is a tempestuous place this time of year. During a dry and warm spell, it’s tempting to want to start to clean up your winter garden and get it ready for spring planting. I was certainly tempted the other day, when the 60 degree weather beckoned me to start weeding, but we are still a few weeks away from frost-free days here in northern Utah—as became abundantly clear the following morning when 6 inches of snow covered the prickly pear cactuses in my front yard. Though I’m no professional gardener, I would encourage you to let your gardens sleep until April, and refrain from cleaning up piles of leaves or wilting grasses, as insects and critters are still taking shelter beneath organic matter, including many of Utah’s native and solitary bees.
The swing between winter and spring is especially noticeable once plants begin to arrive amidst the snow storms. The first week of March was a haze of multi-day storms. Over 50 inches fell in the Cottonwood Canyons, bringing Alta Ski Resort’s snowfall totals for the 2024/2025 season over the 400 inch threshold on Friday, March 7th.
The next morning, the Salt Lake Valley woke to brilliantly blue skies and a vigorous sun in the east. Hydrogen bonds broke and the snow melted, soaking into soil and skipping into waterways. There was a feeling of spring in the air, a sharp contrast to a week that felt like the darkest days of winter. I took a stroll around my yard that day and experienced a thrill of excitement. At the foot of a dormant lilac bush were a cluster of Galanthus nivalus, more commonly known as snowdrop flowers. A short, perennial plant that grows from a bulb, these bell-shaped flowers look like they could be the white skirts of ballerinas.
Their Latin name, galanthus nivalus, means “milky white” and “snow”, and refers to both the snowdrop’s color and how they are one of the very first flowers to bloom in the northern hemisphere. In Europe, where snowdrops are native, entire forest meadows will turn white and green with snowdrops during the gray mists of January and February.
These flowers, like the Spring Equinox, are often seen as a symbol of hope and new beginnings, and, upon seeing them dancing in the March breeze in my backyard, it’s easy to see why. That such a delicate flower could pierce a layer of snow on the ground and bloom during the dark days of winter seems remarkable, and a hint of easier days ahead. The flower felt like a reminder that, despite the intensity of the snowstorm, the earth is tilting on its axis, the days getting longer and warmer. It was a reminder that snow left by a multi-day storm can melt in just a few hours, revealing flowers beneath its crystals.
Now is a wonderful time of year to walk in your yard or through your neighborhood and notice the changes around you. You might see catkins, those fuzzy little caterpillar-looking flowers, dangling from the branches of an aspen tree. You might see meadows of green iris sprouting in what appeared to be barren soil. If you walk outside after a rainstorm, you will smell petrichor, the earthy scent released when bacteria spores living in the soil are sprung into the air by the impact of water molecules. And you will almost certainly hear bird song, one of the true harbingers of springtime.
Birds become active again during this time of year because of photoreceptors in their brains that track the length of sunlight during the day. As the days stretch, birds receive evolutionary cues, also known as “spring calling hormones”, to begin the breeding process, staking out territories and filling the air with their song.
March is an excellent birdwatching month in Utah. Northern Utah is of course home to Great Salt Lake, the largest salt-water lake in the Western Hemisphere, and the lake’s wetlands provide an essential habitat to migrating birds. One such bird is the Tundra Swan. Snow-white with a striking black beak and a wing span of over five feet, the tundra swan is considered a symbol of beauty and grace, and easily qualifies as what environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna.” Now is the time to see these birds floating in the shallows of Great Salt Lake before they leave us to head to their summer breeding grounds in the tundras of Canada and Alaska. A great place to find them, and many other species of birds, is the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Brigham City. If you wish to see the Tundra swans, make sure to pack a pair of binoculars, as they tend to be shy.
Here is a short sound bite from Utah.edu of a flock of tundra swans.
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/gsl/year/
Over 300 species of birds rely on Great Salt Lake for habitat and food. Brine shrimp, tiny salt-water-loving crustaceans, begin to hatch around mid-March. These organisms, along with brine flies, are the main sustenance for the 10 million birds that visit the lake each year. Lake levels determine how healthy brine shrimp and fly populations are, which in turn impact the bird populations. Higher lake levels encourage the growth of microbialites, underwater sedimentary deposits that provide a food source and habitat for brine shrimp and brine fly larvae. Low lake levels mean that many microbialites dry up, threatening the ecological wellness of the lake.
And now, for some numbers.
In the coming months, Great Salt Lake water levels will rise as the snow begins to melt in the mountains. As of March 19, 2025, Great Salt Lake is at 4,193.4 feet in elevation at the Saltair Boat Harbor, which is almost four feet lower than the lake’s median levels at this time of the year, according to the United States Geological Survey. The snowfall of the last few weeks has certainly helped bolster the snowpack in the mountains. The snow water equivalent, which is how much water there currently is in the snowpack, has reached the 100 percent historical median, which comes as a relief after a slow start to the season.
Snow core samples taken by the Salt Lake County Watershed Planning & Restoration Program on February 27th in Little Cottonwood Canyon show that there is somewhere between 23 and 39 inches of snow water equivalent in the snowpack at plot points at an elevation of 9,432 feet. With all of that water still contained in the snowpack, creeks and rivers in the valley are still relatively low and slow, but that will change rapidly as the days lengthen, causing vigorous snowmelt.
Once the snow begins melting in earnest, creeks and rivers in the Wasatch and Salt Lake Valley will swell dangerously. At Tanner’s Flat, a campground about halfway up Little Cottonwood Canyon, Little Cottonwood Creek is still slumbering. As of March 19th, the creek has a depth of less than four inches at that location. The creek’s discharge, which is how much water is moving through the creek, is about 9 cubic feet per second, or 9 cfs. At peak flow, this creek is typically about 4 feet deep and has a discharge of over 600 cfs. The farther back into the summer the snowpack sticks around, the more moisture will remain in the mountains, acting as a sort of frozen reservoir.
If northern Utah continues to receive a healthy amount of snowfall this spring, we should see Great Salt Lake rise in elevation. Unfortunately, greedy politics will likely prevent the lake from reaching its median, though that’s a discussion for a future episode.
What this means is, though many of us are in hopeful anticipation for an early spring and less snowfall in the coming weeks, we should keep doing our snowdances, if not for a healthy snowpack in the Wasatch at the top of our watershed, then for a healthy Great Salt Lake at the bottom of our watershed.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this teaser episode of Snow and Salt. I would love to hear what you think. If you’d like to reach out to me with feedback or ideas, please click the link in the episodes notes. In the coming episodes I hope to bring naturalists, gardeners, and activists on to talk about wild spaces, backyard gardens, and water policy. If you, or someone you know, might be interested in a future collaboration, I would love to hear from you. All of my resources are in the episode notes as well.
Thank you for listening. See you on the solstice.
