Lower lick creek

Given the morning’s forecast, we decided at the parking lot to dial back our objective for the day and stay in less aggressive terrain. Lots of new snow made for difficult trail breaking conditions. Shrubs and down logs still lurk, but snow was supportive enough to lessen the hazard/ride over top. A quick hand shear had the new snow popping on top of the dirt layer failing on what looked like a graupel layer. During a moment of good visibility, we looked around and didn’t see any natural crowns or old debris. As we approached the upper slopes, we had several collapses in more wind affected terrain. We skied 1 at a time and picked a safe route through the upper section. During a 2nd run, a ski cut in a suspicious spot triggered a 20x30 foot 1 foot deep wind slab. This was adjacent to other tracks and was confined to the small terrain feature. On a 3rd run, we intentionally stomped a cornice which easily released a VW bus sized chunk that rolled down the NE aspect harmlessly without triggering a deeper slab. We then noticed that the cornice drop had remotely triggered a large wind slab (3-4 feet deep)on the heavily wind loaded SE aspect on the other side of the small ridge. Skinning along the ridge for our 4th lap to access a safe ramp to descend, we felt a large collapse and this had remotely triggered more wind slabs/storm slabs on the east aspect below us. Finally, we saw more wind slabs releasing on a SE aspect of a rocky knob about 500 feet below the ridge. Touchy conditions in upper wind loaded slopes at 7500’ on a primarily eastern aspect in this area. We did not experience any instabilities in more wind sheltered terrain. We traveled as per considerable hazard, was somewhat surprised at the touchiness of the wind/ storm slabs. We didn’t take a closer look at the bed surfaces due to lingering hazard and poor visibility, but guessing it failed on old snow/new snow interfaces judging by the size of the crowns.

Quick report