Brandywine Season-Opener Bowl

Sid Smith , Tuesday 29th October, 2024 11:15AM

We rode a north facing bowl off of the South ridge of Brandywine mountain as well as some E & SE open slopes. We stuck to smaller terrain features where potential slab size was minimized, as surprisingly, we observed multiple signs of instability even in the very new snowpack. Roller-balls were widespread after the sun broke through the clouds for a few hours midday, making the snowpack heavier and creating an extremely thin zipper crust at lower elevations that wasn't thick enough to impact skiability, or provide much support.

Near ridge-top at 1900m we probed 95cm of snowpack with a breakable rain crust down about 75cm. The ridge-top snowpack was not very wind-affected, the last part of the storm at least falling during calm weather. It snowed lightly on and off throughout the day and had started snowing moderately hard by the time we got back to our vehicles. The freezing line had moved down as snow was falling as low as 1200m on the drive out although not accumulating at low elevations.

Upon at the top of the ski line, we observed shooting cracks (only 2-3m long but still indicating the snow was breaking off in chunks and not just sluffing) and triggered a small wind-slab, although it was only small due to terrain choice. We observed them only being triggerable on terrain over about 35 degrees. I believe large, steep faces had the potential to produce sizeable avalanches that would have been high consequence due to the thin snowpack. Farther down we were able to trigger some more small point release slides on small Eastern facing sun exposed pitches. I believe riding anything large and steep could have had a pretty bad outcome hence the choice of sticking to smaller terrain. We observed one size 1 natural point release wet loose that had happened recently, likely triggered by a roller-ball falling off a cliff band at 1800m. Some mild whumphing was audible near ridge-top at 1900m