With the long, snowless drought and the high number of backcountry travelers, it is getting hard to find untracked terrain.
These untouched slopes may be in shallow, rocky zones or otherwise undesirable terrain. Use good judgement and safely evaluate terrain before committing to your line.
20-50cms of snow overlays a buried persistent weak layer. This weak layer consists of surface hoar, facets and/or a suncrust. It will be most reactive where there is a settled, cohesive slab on top of a crust.
Sluffing from dry/loose avalanches could potentially trigger this deeper layer.
New snow and facets make up the upper snowpack. As the incoming light snow slowly builds up, it won't take much of a disturbance to initiate a loose avalanche in steep terrain. Manage your sluff accordingly!
Frequent Flyer in Connaught Creek ran Monday afternoon, size 2, across the skin track, burying ~15-20m of the uptrack up to 50cm deep. Trigger was likely strong solar radiation at ~1pm.
Several loose/dry avalanches up to sz 1 were noted from solar aspects in the hwy corridor during peak hours of strong sunshine.
Neighbouring operations, particularly to the west, are still reporting rider & remote triggered avalanches on the Jan 30th layer.
5-10cm of new snow sits on a faceted, variable hardness upper snowpack.
A weak layer of surface hoar, facets and/or suncrust (Jan 30th) is 20-50cm down. This layer failed easily in snowpack tests at 1700m on the Smart paths. Watch out when this layer gets overloaded!
The Jan 7th layer is down 50-80 and is decomposed surface hoar or a thin crust on South and West aspects. This layer has been inactive recently.
An active weather pattern is slowly developing, with a weekend storm on the horizon.
Tonight Cloudy. Alpine low -11°C. Ridge winds S 15km/hr
Wed Isolated flurries late in the day. Trace amounts. Alp high -5°C. Light S wind. Freezing level (FZL) rising to 1300m.
Thurs Cloudy with isolated flurries. Alp high -5°C. Ridge wind SW 20km/h. FZL 1500m.
Fri Flurries. 5-10cm. Alp high -6°C. Ridge wind SW 25-40km/h. FZL 1300m.
