Northwest Coastal

This bulletin assumes overnight cooling occurs on Thursday night, leaving frozen crusts on Friday. In any areas where there is no surface refreeze, consider the avalanche danger moderate.

Fair - Timing or intensity of solar radiation is uncertain on Saturday

Any lingering precipitation should peter out on Friday, leading into a dry weekend. Temperatures warm on Saturday afternoon, when the freezing level is forecast to spike up to 2800 m. Winds are light to moderate from the north.

Most of the recent avalanche activity has been confined to the big terrain near Stewart. On Wednesday, a size 3 glide slab released and several loose wet avalanches were triggered by solar warming. On Tuesday, explosives avalanche control produced deep persistent slab avalanches to size 4. Elsewhere, there has been little reported.

Cornices are weak and have begun to fail with warm temperatures. In the south of the region, melt freeze conditions exist below about 1800m. At higher elevations, wind slabs may be found on north facing terrain, and a melt freeze crust on solar aspects. Between 15 and 40 cm below the surface you may find weak surface hoar which was buried on February 10th. Although recent warming may have destroyed this potentially weak layer in some areas, I'd dig down and test for this layer at upper elevations where colder temperatures may have allowed for this weakness to persist. In general, the mid and lower snowpack are strong and well-settled. Further north in the region, slightly cooler temperatures have persisted and melt freeze conditions are not as widespread. In these areas deeper persistent weaknesses are more likely to exist.