Thin spots in steep high alpine terrain, especially in the north of the region are the places to watch right now.
Weather Forecast
Friday: Dry. Warm alpine temperatures with freezing level around 2500 m. Ridgetop winds around390 km/h from the west. Saturday: Dry. Cooling through the day. Winds becoming northerly or northwesterly, but staying mostly light. Sunday: Snowfall amounts 2-5 cm. Freezing level around 800 m. Moderate southwesterly winds.
Avalanche Summary
No recent avalanches reported.
Snowpack Summary
Up to 50 cm of settled storm snow has been saturated by rain up to about 2100m. Pretty much all snow surfaces now sport a hard frozen crust. At the highest elevations you might find dense, stubborn wind slabs in lee terrain. Very low down you might find some areas where only a thin crust overlies moist or wet snow.For now, at least, deeper snowpack weaknesses have been largely rendered inactive by the strong capping crust layer. If there is an area of concern, it would be in the north of the region near Goldbridge, where a deep persistent slab from 26-Jan was remote-triggered on surface hoar buried 70 cm below the surface. Steep convexities and thin-to-thick trigger areas in the high alpine may still have the potential to release a slab in this part of the region.
Problems
Persistent Slabs
Persistent Slab avalanches are the release of a cohesive layer of snow (a slab) in the middle to upper snowpack, when the bond to an underlying persistent weak layer breaks. Persistent layers include: surface hoar, depth hoar, near-surface facets, or faceted snow. Persistent weak layers can continue to produce avalanches for days, weeks or even months, making them especially dangerous and tricky. As additional snow and wind events build a thicker slab on top of the persistent weak layer, this avalanche problem may develop into a Deep Persistent Slab.