Heather Meadows

I wanted to see how reactive these new storm layers were during my outing today, and I got obvious feedback and clues: snow was reactive to human triggers. There were red flags and clues from the start of my outing, an immediate message to steer clear of steep slopes- it was windy and snowing heavily and I could feel a subtle “upside down”snowpack with my pole and got failures in isolation beneath the harder layer in quick hand and pole pits. Finally, there were two human triggered avalanches- both intentional, but one I suspect was quite a bit of a surprise, still, for the folks involved. That avalanche failed 55cm deep and wrapped all the way around both sides of 5 Minute Trees. Of note, is that we didn't observe any natural avalanches- although visibility was rather sub par. 

Shooting cracks of moderate length and intensity occurred in steep wind drifted test slopes.

Snow surfaces were highly variable due to wind. I saw active wind transport, pillows and textured surfaces everywhere.

Despite this, in more sheltered areas there was a softer, lighter layer of fist-hard snow(about 10cm or 4inches) over a harder 4-finger layer. At about 35cm deep, there was a softer fist hard layer. Beneath that was harder 4 finger snow down to the 1/3 crust at about 55cm. The crust was still soft and moist in most places, and snow was well bonded to that layer.

I did a crown profile at the top of 5 minute trees, where snow was wind loaded and the structure was similar, yet depths were deeper. The avalanche was 55cm, or about 2ft, deep. Propagation resulted in extended column tests. The crack visible in the pit photo is from a block of hangfire that only slid a few inches- but shows a good profile of the avalanche depth.