Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Myself and a friend rode up College glacier creek to the north side of College glacier, then across the valley and over the ridge onto No Name glacier. Both sides of College glacier valley had many large naturally occurring slides presumably from the weather/wind event around January 29th. There were a couple of large cornice failures on the south side of College glacier creek that created very large debris fields. From No Name glacier, we rode the the “Top of the World” cirque, where we noticed many other natural slides of the same nature, and another large cornice failure that carried a debris field quite a ways onto No Name glacier. From Top of the World, we rode the base of the mountains to the western lateral moraine of the Gakona glacier. Along our route, my friend cut a side hill at the base of the hill that caused shooting cracks to propagate at least 150 yds up the slope, in both directions. I did not get any photos of this due to our urgent retreat from the base of the hill. We dropped down the western lateral moraine of the Gakona onto the glacier body and rode to the intersection of the Canwell, directly below Mt Gakona. This was our turnaround point, and we took the usual way back to the monument, over the tit, out first aid, etc. The snowpack for the lions share of our ride was a few inches of powder on top of very firm crust. The Gakona glacier had less powder, and many more spots with bullet proof crust. I noticed lots of small solar releases off of south facing rocks, especially on College glacier early in the day. Also, pretty much the entire mess of drainages that flow into Gunn creek on the West side of it’s headwaters have naturally slid. There is a very recently dead young caribou in the “finish line” gulley coming off of first aid.