Arctic Valley

Unfortunately, the areas in the Chugach State Park where there is enough consistent snow coverage to ski are the most likely places to trigger an avalanche this weekend. Snow surfaces varied from supportable wind affect snow, to punchy grabby wind slabs, to hardpacked windboard. The snowpack structure was predominately a pencil hard windslab on top of fist hard weak, faceted sugary snow.  We noted two layers of facets- the near surface facets right beneath the windslab and larger (2mm) faceted grains at the base of the snowpack with striations. The snowpack was touchy.  When we conducted our ECT test we had propogation on isolation at the windslab/near surface facet interface and we felt a large significant collapse while touring.  We suspect that the caught and carried Peak 3 avalanche earlier in the week failed at this same interface. We are glad everyone is okay.  Given the sensitive snowpack and poor snowpack structure of a hard wind slab on top of weak, sugary faceted snow, a human triggered avalanche is likely right now in the Chugach State Park.