By JAYSON JACOBY

Baker City Herald

The surveyors first measured snow at Dooley Mountain on Dec. 29, 1939, and they’ve gone back about 300 times since, but what they found on the mountain Wednesday was unlike anything they had found there before.

The snow was the same, of course white, cold, wet.

There was just more of it than ever before.

Specifically, there was more water in it.

Technically the surveyors from the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service gauge snowpack. What that term means, though, and the statistic they’re really after, is the amount of water that will trickle away as the snow melts.

On Wednesday at Dooley Mountain they calculated that water content at 17.8 inches.

That bests the previous record high 17.2 inches, set just two years ago, on April 3, 2006.

The average water content in early April for the Dooley Mountain measuring site, which is about half a mile west of the Highway 245 summit, is 7.5 inches.

This bountiful snowpack bodes well for farmers, ranchers, anglers, boaters and anyone else who counts on an ample supply of cool water come summer.

A glut of water is especially welcome considering last year’s scanty snowpack, which resulted in significant shrinkage at many local reservoirs.

Phillips Reservoir, for instance.

This impoundment along the Powder River in Sumpter Valley, about 16 miles southwest of Baker City, is storing about 16,820 acre-feet of water today.

That’s about 23 percent of full pool.

However, the water content at Bourne, near the Powder River’s headwaters, is higher than it was this time in 2006 20.5 inches now compared with 18.3 inches two years ago.

Phillips filled in 2006, even though it was less than one-third full in early April.