Avalanche Forecast

Moderate

Cloudy with scattered flurries.  Snowfall accumulation of 4 cm.  Alpine temperature -8.0.  WInds are light from the east and freezing levels at valley bottom.

Avalanche activity has been pretty limited in the land of 'K' but in Banff/ LLYK National Parks where they have received more storm snow over the January interface and are seeing more skiers triggering loose dry avalanches that are running far and fast and increasingly more dangerous. These avalanches size (1.5-2.0) are now getting big enough to injure and potentially bury someone if the run out was a terrain trap. Skiers need to watch this especially on bigger, steeper, more committing lines in the alpine and ice climbers need to start being more attuned to the changes that are emerging with ice routes that have alpine start zones and in terrain that is in gulley terrain that magnifies the effect of even small avalanches.  The new snow is building up over this weak January 7th interface and now that we have had some wind input, any additional stressors (precipitation, wind, solar inputs) has good potential to tip the scales.

The biggest change was some localized wind effect in the Commonwealth and Burstall Pass areas from a few days ago. I suspect there is some wind slabs right at ridge top alpine features in the immediate lee of the wind and also on crosswind effected slopes and gulleys. The other topic of discussion is the thick layer of facets from the long drought from mid December up until recently.  These windslabs if triggered have the potential to run and then entrain the facets further down the slope. This is a pretty significant layer of facets up to 20-30cm thick and in shallow snowpack areas (ie wind affected areas in the alpine & shallow area TL and below) the entire snowpack could be facetted. Terrain at TL and above where the snowpack is deeper than 70-80cm will have some structure and thus be supportive and more reliable.