Quick report
- Collapsing
- isolated
We toured up Slide Mountain from SR431 starting at 9:00am hoping to find corn on the E/SE aspects since those aspects have received enough sun and warmth to go through a few melt freeze cycles. On the approach there was a thin layer of snow from the precipitation over the weekend over a melt-freeze crust. Summited at the weather station, and found good corn conditions. Skied toward the SE bowl. While skiing down the SE bowl, the elevated air temperature was noticeable. As we skied lower in the bowl, the snow got progressively softer and less stable. At one point, we saw pinwheels as tall as us result from some of our turns toward the bottom. We did not dislodge and notable wet loose slides, and most of what we skied did not show wet loose instabilities. The pinwheels only became evident below 8500ft. We toured back to SR431 by Ophir Creek. In some of the more wind-exposed areas of meadows climbing up by Ophir Creek at around 8300ft, we started to experience some collapsing that appeared to be occurring underneath the wind crust from the wind storm mid last week. The collapses were fairly close to the surface, but propagated a significant distance. If we were not on such low angle terrain, we would have been concerned. Our timing was about as late in the day as I would have been comfortable being in this terrain.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2.5
- Aspect
- SE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 8400 ft
Multiple D2+ sized wet loose avalanche debris fields on the SE bowl of Slide Mountain. Looked to be naturally triggered a few days ago by the increased warming and sun that this SE bowl receives compared to the rest of the Mt Rose zone.