Avalanche Forecast

Fair - Due to limited field observations

Overnight Monday & Tuesday: Moderate Northerly wind backing to strong Westerly or Southwest. Around 10 cm of additional snow with continued cold temperatures (below freezing all elevations). Wednesday: Continued wind: moderate to strong from the west or northwest, with another 5cm of snow and just slightly warmer to around -7 C in the alpine (freezing level climbing to 400m or so).Thursday: Winds finally easing off and backing to the South, continued unsettled with continued light precipitation and just slightly warmer than Wednesday.

Recent reports are of sluffing from steep terrain and small slabs (up to size 2 which isn't that small) forming in pockets behind ridges and ribs. I expect the number and size of windslab avalanches will increase with forecast wind, even if there isn't very much additional new snow.

HST 20 cm building slabs lee SW. Wind should veer to W or NW.Prev Entry (Shannon Jan 27): Variable accumulations of new snow but somewhere around 20 cm is a good estimate for the region. This storm snow continues to build over a variety of old surfaces including old hard and soft wind slabs, scoured slopes, blue ice, thin melt-freeze crusts on southerly slopes and surface hoar. Many windward slopes are scoured and thin. Recent snowpack tests recently gave generally hard to no results near Smithers. An otherwise strong mid-pack overlies a weak base layer of facets/depth hoar. Triggering of this basal weakness may still be possible from thin spots and/or rocky outcrops. I suggest digging down, or probing the snowpack to get a handle of average snowpack depths, variability and test results. The average  snowpack depth is around 100 cm at treeline, but remains quite inconsistent across the region.