South of Flattop Mountain

It was a loud day in the mountains, and not from all the motorized users in the area. Fraglie weak layers below a cohesive slab is a dangerous recipe to get into trouble. While natural avalanche activity has tapered off, human triggering remains likely on all steep slopes across all elevation bands. Maintain a conservative mindset and evaluate all steeper slopes first before committing.

Weak, collapsible snow layers exists on most slopes in the form of large surface hoar on top of F to 4F surgery facets. These weak layers are now buried 1 to 2 feet deep  depending on elevation and recent wind-drifting. We started encountering evidence of natural and rider-triggered avalanches around 4,700 feet. By the time we climed higher in elevation, audible collapsing emerged. By the time we gained the ridgeline at 6,300 feet and started walking above drifted slopes, we triggered long-running cracks and one avalanche pushing size 2 from about 10 feet back on the ridgeline. Our snowpit slightly lower down around 5,800 feet provided constrasting results. Approaching that pit location, we observed a loud collapse. Digging deeper, we found an extremely obvious layer of fragile surface hoar below an approx. 18 inch slab. Despite the notable hard over soft layering, we only observed non-propagating results in ECTs with moderate force, and PST cut lengths were about half the column length. While this is not what we expected, a very worrisome snow structure looms in many locations to not place too much emphasis or trust in one data point - test results can vary in unknown or unexplained ways. The same snowpack structure in our pit location was the same structure where we triggered long-running cracks and the said avalanche. While descending a southeast-facing slope, we experienced numerous audible collapses on any part of the slope that nudged slightly steeper than 30 degrees. Below the storm snow on sunny slopes is a 1 to 2 cm crust, with F hard facets below. As this crust continues to be incrementally loaded, the potential of natural slides could increase as well rider-triggering.