Balmy weather eats away at Hood snowpack

Mount Hood, Ore. — High-elevation rainfall has taken a toll on the snowpack at Mount Hood in Oregon.

Jon Lea, hydrologist with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, led a monthly expedition to a monitoring station near Timberline Lodge on a balmy morning Thursday.

“It feels and looks like it’s June up there,” he said later.

Lea measured 74 inches of snow, with a water content of 35½ inches. That’s just 78 percent of average for the date.

The picture isn’t so anemic, however, across the Columbia River basin as a whole. Lea said the snowpack in the U.S. portion of the basin is about 94 percent of average for the date.

Typically, he said, about 65 percent of an average year’s snowpack accumulates by the end of January.

A healthy snowpack is important because, unlike many other major river basins, most of the water that flows out of the Columbia first clings to the mountains as snow. Abundant spring and summer runoff irrigates crops, propels ocean-bound salmon and generates the bulk of the region’s energy supply.