The main avalanche problems of concern today are wet loose issues on South, East and West facing terrain and cornice triggered avalanche potential. Sunny weather over the last several days combined with relatively light winds and increasing daylight hours are warming South, East and West aspects along with ridgetops. Look for wet loose signs such as trees and rocks shedding snow and avoid lingering under cornices. Expect wet loose activity at middle and upper elevations and expect the hazard from both of todays avalanche problems to increase throughout the day.
With clear skies, warm daytime temps and strong solar radiation wet loose activity has been observed on South, East, and Westerly aspects and should continue to be the case today. While these slides are usually smaller they do have the potential to entrain more snow and are hard to escape if caught.
With last weeks strong SE winds cornices on Northern aspects have developed and matured. These cornices are especially sensitive to collapse with human interaction and to some extent with warm daytime temps and strong solar radiation. While cornice failures can be a danger all by themselves the main concern is triggering an avalanche in the new snow layer or possibly in deeper layers that would not be reactive to a human trigger. If a failure occurs on one of those deeper layers avalanches have the potential to be quite large and run for long distances.
Middle and upper elevations of Douglas island saw 7 straight days of snow last week and gained nearly 3" of SWE from the storm cycle. Winds were strong to extreme at times during the storm and temps were fairly warm. These conditions refreshed starting zones with storm snow and fresh wind slabs and also added considerable mass to our cornices. As the storm faded early in the week, Douglas went into a multiday period of fair weather. Skies have been partly cloudy to clear and temps at ridgetop have been in the 20's during the day and dipping into the teens at night. These condtions have given last weeks storm snow time to settle and bond however the pleasant weather has created wet loose and cornice problems. Wet loose activity has been observered on South, East and West aspects at middle asnd upper elevations and Cornices have been actively failing.
