Avalanche Forecast

Moderate -

Thursday: Mix of sun and cloud / Light south wind / Alpine temperature -14Friday: Cloudy with sunny breaks and isolated flurries / Light southwest wind / Alpine temperature -5Saturday: Flurries / Moderate to strong southwest wind / Alpine temperatures of about -4More details can be found on the Mountain Weather Forecast.

There is no recent avalanche activity to report over the last 3 days. However, on Sunday there were several skier, snowmobile and naturally triggered avalanches to report from riding areas to the west of Smithers. One of these avalanches in the Microwave area involved the full depth of the snowpack and resulted in a full burial. Click here for a description and images of the incident on Facebook. Another report in the Ashman area shows a skier-triggered size 2 avalanche running on surface hoar at the storm snow and old snow interface in a sheltered area at tree line. Natural avalanches are reported to be full depth of the snowpack to size 3.5 in the alpine and at tree line. Although avalanche activity has tapered off, I would expect it is still possible to trigger a high consequence avalanche.

A series of snowfalls last week accumulated 40-80 cm of storm snow, which now sits above a widespread rain crust up to about 1300 m. At tree line and above, the storm snow is settling and/or being redistributed into new wind slabs. Below, several buried surface hoar layers can be found, between 50-100 cm deep. Before the storm, these layers had been yielding moderate to hard results in snowpack tests. A generally stiff mid pack sits above weak sugary snow near the ground. The new load sitting on top has reached a critical level and has woken-up a deep persistent slab problem in many parts of the region. The consequences of triggering an avalanche on this layer are high. This is a good time to be very cautious and disciplined with terrain choices.