Southeast Mountains

Avalanche hazards are small and isolated, and the snowpack is generally safe.  Most terrain lacks sufficient snow for avalanches. Use caution in extreme terrain, high elevation terrain where a small sluff or thin wind drift could knock you off your feet.    

Skiers over the past few days have triggered shallow instabilities involving the fresh snow, such as this sluff on Mt. Baldy and this wind slab near Purple Ridge.  Keep these small issues on your radar if you are riding in high consequence terrain in the Northwest Mountains.  They could spell trouble if they push you into rocks or over a cliff.   Winds have been light since Saturday's storm brought up to 6" favoring Paradise Divide: most steep slopes will produce shallow sluffing, but you can find isolated pockets of soft slabs where there was just enough wind to add some cohesion to the new snow.  Because these surface instabilities will be soft and shallow, defensive ski cuts can test for or mitigate the problem.  With winds increasing tomorrow, the distribution of these sensitive drifts may expand in the snow-favored terrain, thus the increasing danger trend for the Northwest Mountains on Tuesday.  

We are phasing out persistent slabs as a problem for now.  Most, if not all of the slabs have either faceted away or become dormant under our current weather pattern, and our forecast team is no longer modifying our travel techniques around this issue.  Of course, there is always some uncertainty when forecasting for and assessing the behavior of buried persistent weak layers.  Cherish this moment without a persistent slab on the problem list, because we all know it will come raging back whenever the storm track points our way.