Snowbird, UT – With winter taking slightly longer than expected to deliver its powder The North Face will postpone the first stop of its Masters of Snowboarding series, originally scheduled for Utah’s Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort January 19-21, in order to provide more time for optimal competition riding conditions to develop. Officials in Ogden have also canceled that city’s Winterfest 2012.

The Masters of Snowboarding is the largest open, big mountain snowboarding competition in the country with three stops and an overall prize purse that tops $50,000. The tour will now kick off February 14-17 in Crystal Mountain, Wash., followed by a stop on March 1-4, 2012 in Kirkwood, Calif., and finish off with its championship event at Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort to April 12-15, 2012.

“It’s important for us to maintain the integrity of this event, and to do that we have to wait for more snow,” said Bryan Barlow, Director of Competition. “Snowbird is a great partner of ours and we’re happy to get to work with them later in the season when conditions are more favorable.”

In Ogden, city officials cited the lack of snowfall to date this season in canceling the free annual Winterfest event had been scheduled for downtown Jan. 27 and 28. Snow is expected to transition to rain this week at Valley locations, while ski resorts in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains are anticipating two to three feet of new snowfall by Friday with more expected to fall throughout the weekend.

“We have a very big change in the weather pattern coming,” said Salt Lake City based National Weather Service Hydrologist Brian McInerney. “A moist westerly flow is forecast to move into Northern Utah Wednesday afternoon. The storm system is expected to have multiple embedded storms and last through Monday morning.”