Spring Snows Keep Wintry Lock on West

A spring snowstorm muscled through the West Friday with heavy snow and high winds that closed schools, courtrooms and a Colorado ski resort as it pushed into the Plains. Winds of 60 m.p.h. limited travel on a Utah interstate.

A three-foot snowcover at Colorado Springs closed the branch campus of the University of Colorado and only emergency personnel were to report for duty at the nearby Air Force Academy. District courts in the city were closed.

The Steamboat Springs ski resort had 10 inches of snow, but 40-50 mph gusts forced it to close.

Snow fell from Utah and Arizona to the Plains, where blizzard conditions were expected in North Dakota. This week, up to 4 feet of snow has blanketed the high country of Nevada and Utah, where 20.6 inches buried Milford last week, the most in one day since records began being kept in 1906.

Search Was Slowed

The snowpack also slowed the search for the wreckage of a downed airplane.

“There’s a reported 3 feet of snow,” National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Verlin Tranter said. “We’re going to have real difficulty finding the wreckage. It’s scattered all over, they say.”

One person was killed and another injured when the plane crashed in a snowstorm in El Paso County in eastern Colorado Thursday night.

Up to a foot of snow was forecast in the Mogollon Rim and White Mountains of Arizona. Gusty winds were also forecast, making travel a danger.

Heavy Snow Predicted

Heavy snow was predicted for parts of Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Kansans braced for the “change-of-season” snowstorm and a winter storm watch was posted for western and north central Kansas.

“It’s coming from about two or three sources all merging together,” Darryl Bertelsen, a National Weather Service forecaster in Topeka, said. “It’s from off the southern and central Rockies, in conjunction with a major storm development in the Southwestern part of the United States and also with very strong indications in the upper level steering wind currents.”