Avalanche Forecast

Good

Thursday: Unsettled conditions with scattered flurries and sunny breaks. Freezing levels around 1000m and light northerly winds. Friday and Saturday: A ridge of high pressure is expected to keep things mainly sunny and dry. Freezing levels are expected to hover around 800-1000m on Friday and slightly rise to 1200m for Saturday. Winds should remain light from the north.

Reports from Tuesday include numerous easily triggered wind and storm slab avalanches up to Size 3. The slabs showed a high propensity to propagate fractures with remote and sympathetic triggers and entire bowls releasing wall-to-wall. Most of the avalanches involved the most recent storm snow, but a few stepped-down over a metre to the crust from late March.

Over 60cm of new snow in the past couple of days was redistributed by strong southwesterly winds into thick wind slabs. A predominately crusty weak interface from late March, now down 50-150cm, remains a potential failure layer for large slab avalanches, especially with heavy triggers such as cornice falls and step-down avalanches. The potential for remote triggering, step down avalanches, and wide propagations, makes the current snowpack structure particularly tricky to manage.