Wind slab near miss

Incident Report

Today we were trying to complete the Markhor-Needle traverse. We descended from Markhor and were climbing to the first sub-peak along the ridge. The ridge was complex with cornices on both the north and south in different places. We were standing on the south side of the ridge, just below a north facing cornice, when my partner triggered a size 1.5 wind slab which broke at his feet. The slab slid down out of sight. The slab was 50cm thick and slid on a hard sun crust. The crown was 20m wide. Cracks propagated a further 15m but did not slide. There were small trees and either steeper slopes or small cliffs below (we couldn’t quite see over the transition to the steeper slope). We learned a hard lesson that today that a moderate risk forecast and the possibility of even small avalanches can be extremely dangerous when traveling above exposure. Our terrain choices for the day should have been significantly less ambitious.