Holy smokes

So, we got some snow overnight. Over 40cm in sheltered areas, and we observed 80-90cm in the open meadows below dome peak. Setting a skin track from the resort was an absolute mission, maybe shouldn’t have only brought my 95’s from the interior. Lesson learned. A natural storm slab pulled out at sometime during the night on a NE aspect at 1250m (35* slope). It propagated ~200m across the slope and set off a few sympathetic slides on isolated features (up to 50m away). I dug a quick pit on a representative slope just to the north of the slide and found the following: 1. HS 235cm 2. {2mm} Crust (temperature / rain) down 70cm. This appeared to be what the slab pulled out on but it had reloaded significantly since the event. From what I could tell this layer represented the change in temperature as the warm front began to unload at the beginning of the storm. 3. The slab above the crust progressively consolidates (fist - 4finger) as you descend to 70cm. Below the crust density is consistently 4F. It is quite light on top but holds a lot of mass as you descend. 4. A brief compression test issued no results (CTX). In this location the crust actually appears to be bonding very well to the snow above and below. We didn’t have time to investigate further as it was approaching turn around time; however I suspect a similar crust can be found on other aspects at this elevation, and could be primed for easy triggering on steeper slopes. We found some excellently deep skiing in the mellow trees skiers right of WIAYEJUWU. A group skied eye candy with no significant sluffing or signs of slab activity. When we’re were leaving (@14:00) it was snowing S3 at treeline. The bottom of the resort was -1C and had received a few cm throughout the day, but nothing like the 10-20cm that we experienced at 1200m.