Huntington Ravine

Today's conditions were in-line with the avalanche forecast. In most areas, the snowpack is a variable mix of soft new snow, wind affected snow, buried crusts, and buried facets.  This felt reflective of the active and mixed weather patterns from the past two weeks now with lingering cold temperatures, facilitating the faceting process within the snowpack. Though its easy to find interesting layers within the snowpack (and many of them are considered weak by textbook definitions), the snowpack I found today was generally stable and lacks the ability to propogate. Wind affect and previous avalanche cycles seem to have done a pretty thorough job of stabilizing the current snowpack. However, I would not be surprised to find a small, sheltered, and steep area with a variation of this snowpack that could be sensitive to human triggering. 

Its clear that the east-facing and north-facing avalanche paths have seen avalanche activity over the past couple weeks - mostly from the two big southerly snow storms on the 10th and the 13th.  Avalanche paths on these aspects have well developed start zones and runouts and the tracks of the paths are planar in nature. This means that the size of avalanches that these paths can produce during our next big weather event could be increased and more destructive. South-facing terrain told a different story.  These paths were generally very underdeveloped and currently lack the ability to produce large, destructive avalanches.  The exception to this was seen in very wind-protected areas like the rock hallways in Damnation, Diagonal, and North Gullies. 

I saw no obvious signs of instability during my tour today.