East Slopes South

Avalanches will be unlikely Tuesday as cooling temperatures freeze and stabilize the snowpack. Low snow cover continues to create challenging access and rough travel conditions throughout the East South Zone.

Freezing levels look to fall from 7500ft to 3500ft by Wednesday morning. The strong cooling trend will freeze snow surfaces and further stabilize the consolidated, spring-like snowpack. Cloudy skies and a chance for light precipitation Wednesday night may allow for a trace of new snow to accumulate at the highest elevations. Strong westerly winds may blow fresh snow into shallow and isolated drifts, but any new snow and wind loading doesn't look significant enough to create an avalanche problem. It will take more to fill in the existing rough snow surfaces, and the most significant result of the light snow accumulations may be a fresh crop of rollerballs near the Cascade Crest when the sun comes out Thursday.

Lack of snow continues to limit the potential for avalanches in the East South. Even where it’s deeper, the upper snowpack above the stout Early March Crust remains shallow. As a result, it's hard for avalanches to gain enough mass to pose much of a danger. Instead, simply gaining access to higher elevation terrain could be your biggest challenge. You will need to use summer roads and trails to get to continuous snow coverage. While most lower elevation and southerly slopes have already gone bare, deeper snowpacks seem to continue to hang on near Bumping Ridge and Mt Aix. If you travel to these locations, know that we have a higher degree of uncertainty about snowpack stability because we have not received any recent observations.