Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
- Collapsing
- specific
With such great skiing yesterday the team was eager to return to NE facing couloirs so we set off towards Found. While the IM snowtell claimed 3'' over the last 24 hours it was clear that the upper elevations had received much more with 6''-10'' of low density snow covering our tracks from the day before once we were under Bullion Mountain ~3800. As we continued towards the aprons of the couloirs we came across two small soft slab avalanches that had run naturally since our tour yesterday to ~4000' a D1 from Lost Couloir and a D1.5 from Found. We could not get a good look at the avalanches due to visibility. This was reason to turn around and we settled on transitioning in a safe zone below the couloir at 4155' in the final few kick turns we received a few shooting cracks and a whumph. While visibility was near non-existent we had some absolutely blower turns on the out. While the snow was incredible around the mine the group pivoted to Presidents Ridge SE to have some alder references in the great ping pong ball. We toured to 3300' till bushes became more sparse and visibility became quite flat. The ski, while different than the mine was still quite fun with 3'' inches of hot pow over a edgeable gummy crust. The weather for the day was light snow and light winds, the snow turning to rain at ~1400' on the drive out. Cracking and collapsing only occurred as the skin track reached a steeper slope angle of >25deg
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- obscured
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 1400
- Recent Snowfall
- 15
- Snow Avail For Transport
- large amounts
Wet!
Snowpack
At upper elevations 3500' there is about a foot of low density snow above the crust facet sandwich haunting Hatcher Pass. The new snow fell on this hard surface which may be the interface for the slides that occurred from Lost and Found which appeared to be composed of soft storm snow and not the PWL and slab below. We did not tour to ridge tops and thus did not get the chance to observe wind drifted snow in the upper alpine.
Avalanche
Poor visibility to properly observe the slides. Soft slab D1 from Lost couloir, and a soft slab D1.5 from Found Couloir. Both ran to ~4000' and occurred naturally some time since we left the area at 3pm 4/16. Debris appeared to be new snow and not the slab or PWL below.