Southeast Mountains

A trace to 2" of new snow has accumulated overnight in the SE Mountains, with a little more in the forecast for today. This small amount of new snow will do little to change the avalanche conditions from the past couple of weeks. Loose snow avalanches or sluffs, will be the primary avalanche hazard to manage on steep northerly facing slopes. These sluffs will accumulate mass and speed as they run down long steep slopes. Most of these avalanches will be small in size, but still have the power to drag you through exposed rocks and trees, or pile more deeply in terrain traps. By this afternoon, westerly wind gusts will start to from shallow wind slabs on the lee sides of ridgelines, at upper elevations. 

When uncertainty is present, it's best to error on the conservative side and expect the worst. In that case, it would be to anticipate soft slab avalanche to form even in the sheltered areas of the Northwest Mountains, and for a more specifically located wind slab to form in the SE Mountains where new snow accumulations are less. If the worst-case conditions are anticipated, then you shouldn't be caught off guard by a potentially dangerous avalanche problem. If soft slabs do not form in the new snow, then loose snow avalanches or sluffing will be the only avalanche problem to manage.

Dangerous avalanche conditions are forecasted to develop in the NW mountain by late Saturday afternoon if the snow forecast verifies. Check-in for tomorrow's avalanche forecast and anticipate a rising avalanche danger trend heading into the weekend. 

Below is yesterday's Forecast discussion highlighting the weak snowpack and sluffing avalanche problem due to that cohesionless snow. 

The shallow snowpack around Crested Butte has been weakened and faceted by cold temperatures and valley inversions. This faceted snowpack has produced human-triggered loose avalanches for the past week. The largest of these avalanches have occurred in terrain close to Crested Butte where strong valley inversions have created a cohesionless snowpack the lacks any kind of support. You can check out some observations of this avalanche activity in these observations from Happy Chutesand Climax Chutes. Observations from the past week out of the Northwest Mountains have shown the Dry Loose avalanche problem to be even smaller, involving just the surface snow. Beneath the weak surface often lies a more supportive base that prevents loose avalanches from gouging to the ground. You can look at these observations from the Northwest Mountains to better understand the problem where the snowpack is a bit stronger (Schuylkill Ridge, above Pittsburg, Purple Palace, and Anthracites). One way to help manage this avalanche problem is by performing ski cuts to flush snow prior to descending, and to get a feel for how the snow will behave. The snowpack in alpine terrain is denser than slopes at low elevations and offers a significantly reduced chance of encountering the Dry Loose avalanche problem.