Avalanche

Avalanche: Room of Doom

HathcockSalt Lake
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Avalanche

Trigger Type
Natural
Avalanche Type
Dry Loose
Start Zone Aspect
Northeast
Avalanche Problem
New Snow
Start Zone Elevation
3048 m

On the way up to Room of Doom, my friend pointed out a stream of snow flowing over cliffs lookers left of Barrieto around 11am. We could not tell where it came from, as the couloir was already in the shade. It was small but was flowing for ~10 seconds. As we rounded the corner to gain entry to Room of Doom, we noticed the west facing aspects were wind sculpted while the eastern aspects showed signs of shallow windloading ~3-6in. Upon entering Room of Doom, we saw a small point release that ran ~150ft on an ENE aspect at 10,200ft. It slid on the new snow/old snow interface about 4-6in deep, and ~15ft wide. It was hard to tell if this happened today or over the past couple days since the small storm and wind event. Unfortunately I was not able to capture picture or video of the natural that we saw, but I think the picture of the point release shows the nature of what possibly happened. When small amounts of snow like this slide so far, it doesnt take much to imagine what a larger load would produce once the storms start stacking up.