Snowpack

Observation: Bonkers

Travis HaussenerSalt Lake
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Snowpack

Interesting snow lately, for once we have a real winter and several of our storms have been relegated to stiff wind-born, high danger conditions. I've been touring in Broads a lot and figured I'd go for a quick run up "lower bonkers" my rationale being, I've been observing that slope all week (4 separate occasions/tours), it's safe until you enter the basin, and the low angle stuff makes for good turns and is "relatively" protected from stuff above: which I felt would take a human trigger to react (and no one else was up there). As expected everything up there was wind jacked like crazy (not one turn was made more or less a straight line through the stiff snow). No real observable big natural avalanches had occurred though, given the shock and awe reports. Also I saw zero collapsing on any of the areas traveled but more than likely that's because I kept the angle way down.

I'm curious to see how the new load is going to react with all the now dormant wind slabs. My guess is as good as anybody's but I think we're going to have another low probability high consequence layer keeping the steep skiing in check. More importantly though if you keep the angle down and find the sheltered stuff it's as good as ever.