Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Cracking, Collapsing, Rapid Warming, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Numerous wet slide avalanches from yesterday. The frozen crust cracked in the morning before softening. Later, roller balls were starting naturally from rocks and trees, and we added our own at almost every turn.</p>
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>From pushing a ski pole into the snowpack it was obvious that there were numerous layers and crusts in the pack. Thus with the rapid warming there was a potential for wet slab avalanches from water sinking into the snow pack. We didn't hang around on the south aspect, it looked too sloppy and unstable. We were back at pavement at 1:40.</p>
When we headed up from the Alta Town Hall at 10AM, the snow surface was frozen. By the time we got to Cardiff Pass, the south-east face of Cardiff Peak had several inches of soft wet snow on top. When I took my ski off, my boot went in to the snow knee deep. The snow hasn't formed corn yet but the heated surface was soft on a supportable crust so skiing was pretty good on the south aspects.