Slow Pow

Yukon Field Team , Tuesday 7th January, 2025 6:15PM

We had nearly 30 cm of new snow on the boards arriving at Tiny Town this morning. With considerable avalanche hazard, we kept our terrain selection mellow. We also wanted to avoid areas where the wind had stripped or loaded slopes. We stayed on low-angle slopes lower down in Fraser Chutes. Even so, we were able to remotely trigger a size 2 slab avalanche that failed on the facets (weak, sugary crystals) on the crust from early December. This avalanche happened on a steep, wind-loaded rollover on the slope, and was up to 70 cm deep. We thought this was a good ‘heads up’ to not go any higher into more consequential terrain, so we enjoyed the pow turns down low! We felt moderate southwesterly winds through the day, and saw wind affected snow and stripped faces at ridge top. It was warm, -1 at the highway this afternoon and there is a thin rain crust on the surface, this doesn’t extend much higher than 850 m though.