Avalanche Forecast

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Warm and wet should continue overnight Wednesday, and end sometime early Thursday morning. Expect valley cloud and some periods of broken skies during the day Thursday. Temperatures should cool a couple of degrees by Thursday evening, but will probably be short lived. The next Pacific system is expected to make it to the interior ranges by Friday, bringing rising freezing levels and moderate precipitation amounts.

Some larger avalanches up to size 3.0 have been reported from steep large features on North faces in the alpine that can be seen from the highway corridors. Some smaller avalanches, and a couple of size 2.0 avalanche have been reported from North through East aspects where the wind deposited snow in the lee of terrain features.

Recent wind slabs have been buried by another pulse of snow on Wednesday. Some people are reporting a thin crust on solar exposed aspects that developed late last week, and is now buried by the new storm. The freezing level went up to about 1500 metres during the recent storm. Snow levels taper off to below threshold by about 1200 metres. There is about 60-80 cms of recent storm snow above an early November crust, or series of laminated crusts. Tests have been showing easy to moderate SP (sudden planar) pops on weak facetted crystals at this crust interface, or within the crust sandwich.