Mt Mansfield
Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
7" of new snow fell overnight. The snow felt upsidedown because there was a sandwich of dense snow with a lighter layer in between. The top layer of dense snow was from the persistent northly wind, the bottom from the warmer temperature snow that fell the previous evening. This entire slab (~12") was sitting on older low density snow from Saturday which was on top of the crust left behind from Friday's warm up and subsequent freeze. The two weak layers can be seen in the photos as the crown has two layers each representing the respective denser layers of snow. Prior to these slides cracking was observed even on shallow slopes. Due to this detected instability, the wind, knowledge of the terrain and the many traps that are present, my route changed to a more conservative option which still resulted in multiple avalanches including ones triggered by another skier I encountered near the middle of the run.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- NE
- Trigger
- AS
- Elevation
- 3700 ft
Multiple skier triggered avalanches occured on several pitches in the same aspect. The last one being the most significant and carrying a skier and partially burying them. No injuries and they were able to extract themselves from the debris field on their own.