Quick report
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>No red flags. Everything pretty solid and a lot of larger lines getting tracked.</p> <p>The Moderate danger ratings are for wet activity in the afternoon and for some possible, lingering wind slabs in the upper elevation, wind exposed terrain. But I think most of the terrain will be low danger by Monday because of the expected cloud cover.</p>
I have not been into upper Red Pine since the large avalanche avalanche occurred in the east facing slope above Red Pine that probably occurred 9 days ago on March 1st (reported by me on March 2nd observation). It's pretty impressive and perhaps one of the largest avalanches I have ever seen in there.
It ran most of the way across Red Pine Lake and it must have sloshed it around a bit judging by the shoreline. The debris in the middle is composed of some large debris boulders in various shapes. I poked around on many of them to see if some of them were lake ice pressure ridges caused by the slide impact but they all seem to be just debris piles. I've included a few photos for posterity.
The photos are from various angles, which I hope are self explanitory.
1) Looking up at the fracture line from the big debris boulders that cover most of Red Pine Lake
2) Looking up at the fracture line, which must be about a quarter mile wide and 6 feet deep.
3) Looking down on the lake from just above the lake
4) including looking at the fracture line from near the ridgeline at the head of Red Pine.
5,6) Couple more looking down from above
7) Final one from the lake
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>The very warm daytime temperature with sun and high clouds keep things wet on the sun exposed slopes. But most of the slopes seemed well behaved because they already heated up yesterday and today was just more of the same. Probably the worst aspects were lower elevation north faces where you would get some roller balls going and some loose wet snow and shallow, wet slabs.</p> <p>There may be a few lingering wind slabs left in the high alpine terrain. We found some in the upper elevation, wind exposed terrain including just below the summit ridge but they were pretty settled.</p>
Everything wet except northerly facing above about 9,000' where there was some nice, settled powder from a few days ago.