Montana Avalanche Forecast

The rating each of the 4 centres that forecast here has published, zone by zone. The panel at the top of this page reads api.avalanche.org live and prints each Montana zone with the danger word its own centre published, the dates that product is valid for, and a link to the full forecast. Every rating is the centre's own, read live. A zone showing no rating means the centre has not issued one, which is a gap in information rather than a quiet day.

4 organisations, and they are not all the same kind of thing. Issuing danger ratings: Flathead Avalanche Center, Gallatin NF Avalanche Center, Idaho Panhandle Avalanche Center, West Central Montana Avalanche Center. Of the 4, 3 are Forest Service programmes and 1 is not. Each one’s own page is linked on this one and is the thing to plan on.

16 were published on 2026-09-03, the day this site’s structural snapshot was taken, but the number moves through the year and the live panel above always shows what is out now. Centres merge zones out of season and split them in winter, and the Colorado Avalanche Information Center is the extreme case: it publishes a single statewide polygon in summer and ten named backcountry zones in winter. Zone boundaries also do not follow state lines, so a zone filed under Montana can cover ground in a neighbouring state and vice versa.

No, a zone with no rating is a zone nobody has assessed. "No rating" means the centre did not issue a forecast product for that zone at that time. Most centres publish for a defined season and stop outside it, some publish only on certain days, and a centre can go dark for staffing or funding reasons. None of that changes the snow. Avalanche deaths happen outside published forecast seasons and outside forecast zones every year, and Montana terrain does not become stable because nobody wrote about it.

The avalanche centre that covers each zone. There is one danger scale in North America, the five-level North American Public Avalanche Danger Scale, and the people qualified to apply it to a given piece of ground on a given day are the forecasters at the centre that covers it, working from field observations and snowpit data. Every Montana zone above carries its own centre’s word, unaltered, one click from the forecast that explains it.

130 since 1950-51, which places Montana 5th of the 17 states with any record at all, and 22 of those were in the last ten seasons, 2015-16 to 2024-25. The most recent recorded death was in the 2023-24 season. Those numbers come from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s national accident archive, which is the central record for the United States. Read them as a measure of how many people go into avalanche terrain here as much as a measure of the terrain itself.

The centres set their own publishing seasons and each one says on its own page when it starts and stops, so that is the answer to use. What the national record shows is when people actually die: across the last ten seasons the Feb, Jan, Mar months account for 74 percent of all US avalanche deaths, and the archive still holds deaths in every month from October through July. The tail matters here. Spring corn skiing and summer climbing on snow have both killed people in the record.

No. This page is a directory with a live status line: each Montana zone's current danger word, its validity window and a link. The forecast itself, the part that names the avalanche problem, the aspects and elevations that hold it, and how confident the forecaster is, is published on the centre’s own page, and every zone row above links straight through to it.

A forecast zone is an area of hundreds or thousands of square miles, and the danger rating is a generalisation across it; the slope in front of you can be far more dangerous than the zone rating or far less. Route and terrain decisions need training, current observations and judgement in the field, and no web page can make them for a specific slope. The centres themselves say their rating is not a substitute for those decisions either.