Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Cracking, Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
What a beautiful day to spend in the mountains today. Warm and bluebird with no wind. The exact kind of day that could lure you in to making bad decisions. Lucky for us the red flags were slapping us in the face. Wide spread and thunderous collapsing on all aspects within the new storm snow. Recent avalanching on small steep slopes. Again quite surprised to not have seen more evidence of larger avalanches in the high alpine. I did see a mostly refilled slab that had pulled out likely during the storm below the cliffs in Red Snow Cirque.
I got all the evidence I needed on the drive up to the trail head today. Multiple small steep test slopes that had either avalanched from the plow, a human trigger or naturally. Couple that with all of the collapsing and cracking in the snow we experienced today. Lots of evidence that the snowpack is cranky and will need time to adjust to its new load. It was a North Woods kinda day.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>It was quite obvious today in the high alpine terrain today that the winds had moved a lot of snow around over this past weekends storm cycle. Surprisingly, enough I thought I would have spotted more natural avalanche activity in the high alpine wind zones. </p> <p>Wide spread thunderous collapsing was experienced today in and out of the skin tracks put in earlier in the morning. The upside down dense snow seemed to be collapsing within the new and old snows interface. Failing on near surface facets that littered the surface prior to this past storms additional load. From what I could spot avalanche wise it seems that nothing had failed in the old October snow near the ground. </p>