Avalanche Forecast

Good

Wednesday: Expect clouds to build through the day with alpine temperatures reaching -5 and winds turning southwesterly and easing to light. Freezing levels could reach 1400m. Isolated flurries are possible, with limited accumulations.Thursday: Cloudy skies with intermittent wet flurries. Alpine temperatures could reach -3 with freezing levels at 1500m. Winds remain light southwesterly. 5-10cm are possible.Friday: Expect continued unsettled skies with more isolated flurries, temperatures around -3 and light southwesterlies.

The recent storm snow continues to be reactive to rider triggering and explosive testing but the size of the events has dropped to predominantly size 1.0. These avalanches are failing predominantly in wind loaded features on north through northeast aspects.

Recent convective snowshowers (from Thursday to Sunday) deposited up to 40cm of new storm snow in some locations. The surface snow has been going moist on all aspects up to 1800m and higher in the alpine on solar aspects, and then crusting over at night. The underlying storm snow has settled into small soft slabs and the interfaces within this new snow are predominantly crusts (sun, wind and/or meltfreeze crusts). In high alpine start zones, the surface slabs are stiffer and may have more propensity for propagation. North winds have reverse loaded pockets of the most recent storm snow onto the melt freeze surfaces of south facing slopes, creating small, reactive slabs in unusual places.Buried 50-70cm is a melt-freeze crust from previous sunny weather. At the same interface spotty surface hoar lingers on high, sheltered north facing terrain. Where present, this surface hoar continues to yield sudden results in stability tests.Cornices are huge and have fresh tabs from the recent storm snow.