Natural slab @ Seaton

AvCan Northwest , Wednesday 12th April, 2023 4:40PM

Today we sledded at Seaton Basin. We had mostly sunny skies and a light westerly breeze. We saw one size 2.5 avalanche that occurred naturally, probably 24-48 hours ago. This avalanche happened on an east-northeast facing slope in the alpine, at 1850m. We found significant wind effect in the surface snow from the weekends’ storm. There is about 40 cm of wind-stiffened snow over the melt-freeze crust from late March. We suspect the natural avalanche failed at this interface. We dug on an east aspect at 1650m and found 250 cm total snow depth. We did not get any propagating test results at the melt-freeze crust interface, but it’s one we will be monitoring. The results were non-propagating ECT results, ECTN30 down 25 cm on a density change within the wind effected new snow, and ETCN30 down 40 cm at the crust interface. We had good sledding in sheltered areas at treeline. The alpine is wind affected on all aspects. At the end of the day the surface snow was becoming moist at lower elevations.