Selkirk Mountains

During the morning hours, expect to find a hard refrozen crust covering the surface at all elevations, diminishing the potential for avalanche activity. Spring sunshine will gradually warm and soften surfaces, creating isolated hazards like wet snow peeling away from steep rocky slopes that can run long distances in extreme terrain. While most wet snow avalanches are expected to be small and isolated, continue to practice safe travel techniques like giving cornices a wide berth and avoiding steep slopes once you notice surfaces becoming wet, punchy, and unsupportable.

The springtime diurnal pattern is well underway in the Inland Northwest and Tuesday night finally delivered a significant overnight freeze needed to provide optimal spring riding conditions in the mountains. For the remainder of the week, expect to find firm, icy, and slippery surfaces in the morning hours that will progressively warm and soften throughout the day as sunny skies work across the compass from east to west. Days like today can be great opportunities to explore steeper terrain or bigger objectives in the mountains with the right amount of forethought and planning. Isolated avalanche hazards still exist, but most of the springtime the hazards are generally easier to identify, avoid, and predict, allowing us more freedom of terrain options to explore safely.Before you start mind surfing the map, let us just quickly hold your attention to highlight and address a few of the things that can be the hardest to predict during springtime in the mountains. 1). Timing

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a famous fairy tale about a person who is unsatisfied unless they get the perfect amount of what they are looking for. Not too much, Not too little. They want it just right every time. It is easy to sympathize with and relate to Goldilocks during springtime in the mountains. When we are too early, the snow can be icy, very challenging, loud, and unpleasant. And when we are too late, the snow can be dangerously wet, or it might just be sticky, heavy, and, again, unpleasant. Getting it just right is the ideal, but the time at which that occurs varies day to day, aspect to aspect, differs by elevation and slope angle, and sometimes just doesn’t happen at all. The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to have perfect timing. Our advice is to start early, be mentally prepared for all of potential scenarios, and have a realistic and accessible alternate plan to pivot towards if conditions differ from your expectations or aspirations.2). Cornice FallQuestion: How far back is the ridgeline from the lip of that cornice, or better yet, it there a cornice here at all? Answer: Hard saying. And if you find yourself asking this from behind the top of said ridgeline, it is not worth trying to find out now. Depending on how you approached the ridge, you ideally might know whether or not is has any overhanging cornices present, but if you aren’t sure, it's best to avoid the urge to creep towards the unknown and peer over from the wrong side of the coin. While traversing along corniced ridges, look for clues like solid rock or treetops protruding through the snow. We know that these protruding trees are at least planted into solid earth somewhere below, and they can aid us by functioning as guardrails that we should avoid crossing. Bear in mind that some trees poking through the snow might be rooted on the wrong side of the ridge as well, so it is wise to also give these “guardrails” a wide berth. If traveling into the high alpine, these vegetation clues might not be available to guide you, so even greater margins become necessary.3). Glide Avalanches

And lastly, we would be remised not to mention Glide Avalanches during this period. These avalanches are very much a low likelihood, high consequence occurrence to grapple with. They involve the entire seasons snowpack spontaneously failing at the ground, and are by in large the most difficult of all avalanche problems to predict. Glides are most common in the springtime when meltwater is making its way through the entire snowpack and lubricating the interface at the ground. They occur in similar locations year to year, often where the ground is either a smooth polished slab of exposed bedrock or a steep slope that is predominantly covered in grass and not other brushy vegetation or trees. As a precursor to failure, “Glide Cracks” often become visible at the surface. These cracks are really our only tool for avoiding this problem. Conveniently, they warm us and help identify the places where these large unpredictable slides might eventually occur, so it is best to keep an eye out for these features and avoid traveling directly below the steep slopes beneath them.As always, continue to practice safe travel techniques this spring, like traveling with partner, exposing only one person at a time to avalanche terrain, and being mindful to limit exposure directly above or within terrain traps. We hope that you can find time to enjoy the beautiful spring weather in the mountains this week, before rain and snow return to the area this weekend.

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IPAC is now on the Avy app! View, submit, and share observations on the go using the AvyApp. Your backcountry observations are critical for building our avalanche forecasts. Avy provides a centralized location for core trip planning, and you can view streamlined, up-to-date avalanche and weather forecasts for your selected zone, using offline caching. Download Avy today - App Store and Google Play.