Up to 45cm of recent snow has given a great refresh, but be on guard for wind slabs likely to form with increasing wind Thursday morning. Forecasters expect a bump in the hazard level to CONSIDERABLE as these wind slabs could be very sensitive to triggering.
Minimal wind on a field trip today, but increasing winds tonight/tomorrow with lots of new snow available for transport will develop new wind slabs.
The recent storm snow is sluffing in steep terrain. Due to the volume of storm snow, some of the avalanches have been large.
Several naturally triggered loose dry avalanches were observed today in steep terrain at Treeline and above. Almost all these slides were relatively small, but a few size 2.0 were observed, and a significant size 2.5 occurred on the SE face of Mt Smuts which ran quite far in the track. In addition, one small wind slab was observed in extreme terrain at 2900m on an East aspect.
Between 25 and 45cm of recent storm snow now overlies previously formed sun crusts and hard wind slabs. So far, there has been almost no wind effect, but that is forecast to change on Thursday morning. The bond of the storm snow to the previous surfaces seems pretty good, but just the sheer volume of the recent snow is triggering loose dry avalanches in steeper terrain. As the winds begin to build wind slabs on the surface, forecasters expect a natural avalanche cycle that will fail on either the storm snow interface or a mid-storm layer.
As previously reported, the mid and lower snowpack is dense and strong with no significant weak layers observed.
Thursday should be a mix of sun and cloud, with a chance of a few cm's in the evening. A cool morning should warm to about -12C midday. Winds will increase to 35-40km/h from the SW by early morning.
More details can be found in the Mountain Weather Forecast.
