Snake River Range

Human-triggered slab avalanches up to two feet thick are possible today. Look for signs of the recent snow becoming more cohesive and slabby. Shooting cracks or collapsing are indicators that triggering an avalanche is possible. Signs of wind affected snow or warming are also signs that there's a potential to trigger a slab. Yesterday’s snowfall is sitting on weak snow and crusts that may cause any avalanche to fail wider than you might expect.

Most avalanche activity yesterday was limited to the kind we like most - dry loose sluffing. Some of those sluffs were large and fast moving, especially on the northerly aspects where they ran on old faceted snow. So far, the drought layer has mostly contributed volume to sluffing on northerly, shady aspects but reported avalanches like the one in Mail Cabin may be precursors to the emergence of a persistent problem. The elephant in the room today is that buried drought layer. There are questions about what it will do next, where it remains weakest and how long it will take for the recent snowfall to turn “slabby” enough to become a problem. A sure fire way to stay out of trouble is to ride lower angled slopes until a pattern emerges.

Please consider sharing photos or a description of what you see in the mountains. Observations help everyone keep track of what's happenigng in our unusually spatially variable snowpack!