Major spring flooding not expected despite historically snowy winter

As spring arrives Wednesday, we close out what’s been a historic winter in parts of southeast Idaho.

In Inkom, the Pebble Creek Ski Area had its snowiest winter ever. 339 inches fell on the mountain, despite a slow start to winter due to it being an El Nino year.

“Indeed we have had a great year, especially February,” Pebble Creek Ski Patrol Director Stefan Berkel said. “We broke our 30-year record for that month of 109 and we got 156 1/2 inches. Which actually equals some of our worse years of snow for the whole year.”

Record-breaking totals likely due to the impacts of El Nino.

“It tends to slow the changes in weather and so you can get consistent storms coming through,” Jack Messick of the National Weather Service explained.

“That’s pretty much what happened this year. We had a pretty light December in the Pocatello area but February was close to a record.”

So far, the abundance of snow has actually led to fewer injuries among Pebble Creek patrons.

“I think a lot of people were able to bounce a little better than hitting the hard snow we’d normally get during a high-pressure system,” Berkel joked.

The second snowiest February ever recorded in Pocatello has left snow blanketing mountains and hills all across the region.

Now, with the weather warming up, people are taking a look at the region’s snowpacks and wondering how that will impact potential flooding.

“Everyone, pretty much, got a surplus year. That’s for certain,” Messick said.

“You know, there’s a little bit of concern right now, just in terms of how quickly the snow melt is. Whenever you have a surplus year you always worry about flooding on all the major rivers.”

There is, however, the chance that winter weather lingers in the area for a while, despite current temperatures warming up.

“It could get cold again here in the spring and just add more snowpack, so it’s always a consideration as well,” Messick said.

Messick said the risk of flooding is always there but based on the current conditions any flooding would be minimal due to melt off that occurred in February.

“It helped melt a lot of the lower elevation snow, so the really good, solid snow you don’t really reach until you get up to around 5,500 feet or so,” he said.

That event was “helpful” since it lower flood risks going forward. Still, a lot will depend on the degree things warm up in the coming days, weeks and months.

“If we start getting 70 degree days in late March, early April, that could be problematic,” Messick explained.

The issue is that all of these hypotheticals are so short term and the Weather Service and others won’t really have any idea about when flooding could happen or to what degree until a few days before.

But worry not, due to the delicate warm up the region is currently experiencing Messick said they don’t expect anything more than “a few fields getting kind of muddy and flooded, but it would be pretty limited in scope and we won’t see anything serious.”