Avalanche Forecast

Moderate - Due to the number of field observations

Saturday: Cloudy with scattered flurries and a trace to 5 cm of new snow. Winds light from the southwest. Freezing level to 1000 metres with alpine temperatures around 0. Sunday: Mainly cloudy with isolated flurries and a trace of new snow. Winds light to moderate from the southeast. Freezing level to 900 metres with alpine temperatures around -1. Monday: Wet flurries with 10-15 cm accumulations. Winds moderate from the southwest. Freezing level to 1000 metres with alpine temperatures around 0.

No new avalanches have been reported, however observations of alpine elevations have been limited.

About 20 cm of wet snow overlies a crust at treeline elevations and below. Below this crust, the 50-70 cm of snow we received last week is moist after being saturated with 140 mm of rain on Tuesday through Wednesday. So far, all has been bonding well to a knife hard crust buried February 3rd and previous instabilities at this interface are suspected to have largely subsided at this point. Exceptions to this assumption may exist in the alpine, where some of our recent precipitation fell as snow. Here, storm slabs will have taken longer to settle out and may still be unstable. To manage this uncertainty at higher elevations, dig down to test the bond of the more recent snow layers. Aside from lingering upper snowpack concerns in the alpine, the mid and lower snowpack are settled and bonded at all elevations with the average snowpack depth at treeline around 250-300 cm.