Southeast Mountains

The snowpack is trending in the right direction, but weak layers near the ground are still capable of producing avalanches. These lingering problem areas don’t always stand out visually. If you’re riding steep slopes that held old, weak snow (the north half of the compass and higher-elevation southeast), carefully evaluate for a stiff, cohesive slab.  Manage uncertainty with terrain choices: smaller slopes, mellower angles, and cleaner runouts.

Faceting snow is both a blessing and a curse.  It's the reason that you can still find soft, "recycled powder" on colder aspects during this warm, dryspell—and also why you can trigger an avalanche a week after the storm.  These large, angular grains take a long time to heal once they're buried.  Our current persistent slab problem is the result of weak, faceted snow getting buried in late November through the first week of December.

As we move further from last weekend's storm, more slopes are settling or faceting into equilibrium.  Yesterday on Mount Emmons, we traveled through a number of basins on suspect aspects, hunting for feedback.  Most slopes were quiet: we got a few minor collapses on isolated drifts, then Boom! a large rumbling collapse on an otherwise unremarkable slope.  It wasn't a slope that stood out from others, or one that I would have guessed to be the noisemaker. This highlights how lingering instabilities can be difficult to identify. While the odds are increasingly in your favor for riding safely in steep terrain, you can further hedge your bets by choosing smaller features, mellower slope angles, or terrain without rocks, trees, or gullies in the runouts.  Areas with a thinner snowpack, such as lower elevations or wind-eroded terrain, are the quickest to lose their slabs to faceting, so these areas typically offer the safest snowpack.