Avalanche Forecast

Moderate - Uncertainty is due to the speed, direction, or duration of the wind and its effect on the snowpack.

Wednesday Night: Mainly cloudy with isolated flurries. Alpine high temperature around -7 C. Moderate to strong southwest wind.

Thursday: Mainly cloudy with some sunny breaks and isolated flurries. Alpine high temperature around -5 C. Moderate southwest switching to west wind.

Friday: Mainly cloudy with sunny breaks. Alpine high temperature around -8 C. Light to moderate southwest wind.

Saturday: Cloudy with scattered flurries. Alpine high temperature around -9 C. Moderate to strong southwest wind.

There have been no reports of avalanche activity in the past few days. There are still reports of folks seeing evidence of large natural avalanches that ran during the last storm like this MIN post from Tuesday.

15-25 cm of new snow has been redistributed by predominantly south and southwest wind. This has now obscured previous wind effect from earlier in the week and last weekend, which formed big pillows of wind slab formed on north and east facing features. Reports still indicate that good powder and riding has been found on lee or more wind protected / sheltered areas.

Snow depths at White Pass increased last week and have now settled in around 150 cm at our wind protected Fraser study plot. Deeper locations (higher terrain west of the highway) have more than 200 cm. It's reasonable to expect a thin snowpack composed mainly of sugary facets in the Wheaton Valley, and thinner wind-scoured alpine areas.

Here's a non-technical snowprofile from the Fraser study plot from the end of January.

• Expect slab conditions to change drastically as you move into wind exposed terrain.
• If you are increasing your exposure to avalanche terrain, do it gradually as you gather information.
• Back off if you encounter whumpfing, hollow sounds, or shooting cracks.