Quick report
- Collapsing
- specific
You could boil down the travel advice here to: Follow the wind to find the problem. Sheltered and eroded terrain seem to lack a sufficient slab to pose a persistent threat involving the recent snow: very soft slabs on soft weak layers. Sunday's NW wind event redistributed the snow into obvious, thicker drifts, and avalanche activity occurred on those loaded slopes, the bullseye being E to S aspects, especially where there's a thin collapsible crust creating an abrupt hardness change.
Covered a lot of ground on different aspects, and windloaded south to southeast on lower angle slopes continues to bark while other aspects were quiet. 2 large, scary collapses on SE aspects NTL (one on Cinammon around 11,600' and one above Rock Creek about 11,700). Got a handful of small collapses on similar but smaller features.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- light
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Still some light drifting happening in isolated areas.
Snowpack
Crown profile on the south-facing ATL Galena avalanche showed the avalanche failed on January dryspell facets below a thin crust (see video and profile). The slide broke below a knife-hard slab that formed during the mid-January extreme wind events. The crown was 2 to 3 feet deep, with the upper 2/3rds composed of soft, recent snow, and the bottom third hard slab.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Type
- HS
- Count
- 10
- Aspect
- S
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 12800 ft
Adding a pile of avalanches that ran during the weekend storm. Also took a closer look at the big slide off the west side of Baldy. The debris reached valley floor, had 3’ to 4’ chunks of hard slab in it, suggesting it was a step down at some point. The debris pile was probably 25 feet deep.