Lower Blue

Although there was less than 1ft of storm snow in Hope Valley, we found over 2ft on wind sheltered slopes above 8000ft. Numerous test slopes did not show signs of instability - not even minor cracking - but eventually we got two slopes to fail 4" from the surface. Both were very soft slabs that lost any cohesiveness as they moved downhill, and both failed on a density change that might have occurred around sunrise (based on the depth of the failures and snowfall rates). Trench checks and quick pits showed ~3" inches of graupel at the bottom of the storm snow, but the only failures we observed today were not associated with the graupel.

Two very small and shallow avalanches triggered on test slopes