Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
We were traveling cautiously due to visibility and the 12” of soft snow, but didn’t observe major telltale signs of instability - cracking, collapsing - and the new snow felt unconsolidated at elevations above 5000’. The major problem was the buried surface hoar and it appeared to be sporadic and hard to predict what aspects it was on.
Avalanche
Two of us were skiing the Shuksan Arm on the northeast face of Hollywood ridge around 5300’ when we set off a large soft slab avalanche about 12” deep and 100’ wide that run down the ridge and into the top of Rumble gulley. At the start of the run low visibility kept us cautious while we made our way down the ramp toward the first tree band. There was about 12” of fresh snow that had not consolidated and wasn’t collapsing or cracking. After traversing and testing the slope to make our way down we decided to test a convexity be ski cutting it. This is when the avalanche was triggered. It failed on obvious surface hoar and propagated and moved slowly, but was large and ran significantly. We skied the bed of the avalanche and made our way down through low angle areas but caused three more small slides on convex roll overs. These failed on the same surface hoar and the surface slab became more obvious as we descended into wetter snow.