Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>When we got into Middle Cirque, we had some periods of heavy snow and a good bit of wind. As I approached Lone Pine from the moraine side I looked over at the couloir above LP and saw a wind/storm slab coming down that made me jump a bit as it was ~100-200' wide. However, it moved slow, and did not run full path. I'm pretty sure this was triggered by wind loading in the upper reaches of the couloir (photo below), but it was hard to see much.</p>
Had to do some filtering as the light was really tough today. I would call this a D1 as it moved slow, was really shallow, and the debris were actually skiable. Nate did find some denser old snow in the debris, but nothing propagated. However, it was hard to really get eyes on the start zone.
Nate ripping the edge of lower Lone Pine. He is even with the bottom of the debris from the slide - you can see that it did not even come close to running full path.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>The new snow is being transported by the wind and creating fresh reactive slabs. We'll see what the wind does tonight, but there will probably be some decent sized reactive slabs tomorrow in the alpine.</p> <p>The new snow was pretty sluffy, but didn't really set up into a slab yet. We weren't too worried about it, but it did slide today. I'm guess there will be a lot of releases out of the steeper terrain today.</p>
The snow was pretty fun and by the end of our tour was 6"+. We poked around on our way up at the old snow interface and it's pretty variable. The southfaces were hard underneathe, but not scratchy and we were thinking about skiing them because N faces had a punchy old crust underneathe. Then above timberline things felt much softer underneathe, but only on direct N aspects with some slope gradient, so we decided to find a moderate north aspect out of the wind.