Boom Lake

tim , Monday 4th March, 2024 10:50PM

Headed up to Boom Lake to check out conditions hoping to ski a bit of one of the chutes off of Mt Bell. Most of those west facing chutes have slid 75% of their paths. The chute that is considered the Mt Bell summer route has a sizeable deposit. The coverage in the first couple of chutes in the Christmas trees was sparse. We headed up the chute north of the ‘Mt Bell Summer Route’ hugging the trim line and ducking into the trees on the way up. The sun came out so we decided to go down. I dug a hasty pit and the ECT failed while I was cutting the back. Maybe 60ish cm down. It was quite planar and the crust it failed on was about 2 inches thick and very strong like ice on the top of it. Crap facets lower down. We took the least steep line down, while in terrain that was ~20-25 degrees on one turn a large whumph shook all the trees around me. We also saw several avalanches on the East face of Mt Boom in what appeared to be wind loading conditions or sun hitting the cornices and wind loading. There are several crowns at the top of the fans on several features on that side. One slide came down from high up climbers right of the prominent couloir across from the end of the hiking trail (not Kindergarten) The cloud almost dusted the lake. Another larger avalanche was seen out of unskiable terrain further north of Mt Boom as well which also appeared to be wind loading and possibly some solar effect.