Cooke City north

We covered a lot of ground today. We didn't observe any obvious signs of instability while riding. We did find a layer of buried surface hoar when we dug a snowpit, and it produced an unstable test result (ECTP19) - photo below. 

HERE'S THE PROBLEM - it will be easy to gain confidence in the snowpack due to a lack of clues. The snowpack probably won't talk to you until you find a spot that avalanches. There are two probable reasons for this. One is that may of the places we ride were ridden by other people which destroyed the weak, faceted layer that formed during dry weather in January and the first week of Feb. Two is that very warm weather and wind made this weak layer highly variable - even though it formed on most slopes. 

There have been at least 5 avalanches. There will be more. Good places to trigger them will be on "out-of-the-way" slopes that aren't ridden often. Other places will be high in bowls. The lower aprons of many of the bowls were tracked up with much fewer tracks in higher terrain. You may see many more tracks, and think a slope is safe to climb higher, but the upper parts of many alpine bowls may have a totally different snowpack that remains unstable. 

 

5 recent avalanches that we know of. Otherwise, we saw zero other signs of instabilty.