Mt. Judah

During our tour in the Mt. Judah and Donner Pass area, we saw several signs of unstable wind slabs including:

• Three natural or cornice-triggered wind slab avalanches that failed between 11 am and 3 pm (see avalanche section for details)
• What looked like a human-triggered wind slab avalanche that failed between 12:30 and 3 pm
• Many cornice failures and small wind slab avalanches that occurred in the last 24 hours
• Large skier-triggered cornice collapses above small test slopes. In some cases, the cornice blocks triggered cracks or test slope failures on the slopes below them, and in other cases, they did not. 
• Long, skier triggered shooting cracks on wind loaded test slopes
• Moderate to intense blowing snow all day

We saw additional signs of wind-blown snow including drifted snow and large ripples across slopes. Many cornices had 4 to 6 + feet overhangs and continued growing throughout the day. We did not approach anywhere close to the edges of the largest cornices. 

We also saw debris from a large storm slab avalanche that likely occurred on the night of March 12 or early morning of March 13. We dug into the snow near this avalanche and found graupel at the base of the storm snow resting on a frozen crust. Snowpit tests did not indicate ongoing instability on this layer, and it looked like the crust may have been wet when the graupel fell since some of the graupel had frozen into it.