Whitefish Range

Generally safe conditions exist in the Whitefish Range today. Pay attention to changing surface conditions as the warm sun begins to break down the snow surface. Move to shaded slopes if you see signs of rollerballs or point releases out of steep, rocky terrain.

Cold overnight temperatures re-froze the surface into a hard melt-freeze crust. Your best window of riding conditions will be once this crust begins to soften on solar aspects. Move off these same aspects as soon as you begin to see signs of the crust breaking down or signs of an impending wet loose avalanche cycle. I suspect that any wet loose avalanches today should be relatively small and easy to manage.

Give yourself a large buffer zone near cornices, both overhead and while traveling on ridgelines. These mostly fail during the heat of the day, but can fall spontaneously. The other obvious hazard to avoid is glide cracks. We have had reports of numerous Glide Avalanches this season. This kind of avalanche wipes out the entire season's snowpack and causes very destructive avalanches. Stay out from underneath them.

You will notice that we took persistent slab off of the problem list. A lack of avalanche activity and relatively mild weather conditions has given us the confidence that the likelihood is low enough to remove the problem entirely. The last reported avalanche on the late January facet/surface hoar layer failed on March 14th in the Flathead Range. Since then, we have primarily found the problem most concerning on upper elevation, northerly aspects where facets and surface hoar can still be found. Snowpit tests and results in these locations are showing the layer is unlikely to propagate. Although it is very unlikely, I’d still select terrain that appears to have uniform snow depth and lacks likely trigger points, like convexities and rocky outcroppings.