Above Smiley Creek

A great night to be a snow and avalanche nerd! Walking across the flats I found a nice rain crust that formed the previous day. This made for some unique-sounding collapses.... I could hear the crust hissing/tearing/sizzling as the collapses propagated away from me. I collapsed most low elevation slopes that I walked across, then collapsed them again on the walk back. This crust continues as a rain crust to around 8200 or so, where it begins to fade rapidly. There are obvious signs of the ambient warm temps above, but no icy crust. 

I continued up, walking above some short but serious paths (ugly terrain traps). Here I remotely triggered 2 slides that failed on E-facing slopes above a steep gully. Slopes above the crown were spiderwebbed, with up to 7-8cm displacement across the cracks in places.  The closer slide to be initiated about 100 vertical feet downslope from me and broke roughly 200 feet wide. The second slide opened up roughly 900-1000 feet up the gully from the first slide and triggering location. The vertical on both slides was short, but in any other terrain these would be D2s. Both slides piled up debris deeply in the gully, an estimated 12-15 feet deep below the larger slide.