heed your local sheriff

The mountains here are continuing to get pounded with snow.  Snowbird's newest advertising slogan is 7 FEET IN 7 DAYS! - which is quite catchy, I think.  Alta has gotten 30 inches in the last 24 hours, which sort of boggles the mind. 

Unfortunately, all that fabulous snow is currently inaccessible to those of us who are valley-bound: the road up Little Cottonwood Canyon has been closed all day and was possibly going to open later this evening, per the Salt Lake County Sheriff's email blast that H gets, and Alta's ski resort itself wasn't going to open at all until tomorrow morning.

It seems like there may have been some dissatisfaction among the hoi polloi with that announcement because H also got this email from the sheriff, some time later:

When the chance of an avalanche is likely and the Alta Marshal deems the area unsafe, The Town of Alta goes into an interlodge alert. This is when all occupants must go inside a building and stay there until the area is determined to be safe again. Sometimes this takes minutes and sometimes, during extreme storm cycles, it can take days. The important thing to remember here is to never ignore an interlodge warning or sign. This could endanger not only your own life, but the lives of others as well. The price of any inconvenience you may suffer is small compared to the public's safety so please cooperate with the official efforts.

Did you catch that?  The whole town has to go inside and stay inside until the avalanche danger is over.  That's wild!