Touchy conditions E of highway

<p>We spent Saturday (Feb 24) poking around in the Big Blue valley, big scary whumps all day and a few of them caused small slides on micro terrain. The biggest was a size 1 on a steep SE facing wall of a large canyon. I skinned out onto steeper terrain than I thought in the white light and as I realized I shouldn't be there, I got a big long wumph and felt the snow start to move. I was able to turn and get a few steps down before the snow started to pile up on my uphill ski. Scary moment, and lucky there wasn't more energy in that small feature as I just had to dig out my ski. The main crown was ~20m across and 20-50cm deep, and slid on facets over a icy, but decomposing crust. Near the bottom of the bed you can see that it stepped down through a couple of smaller crust layers. Pretty scary how large some of the debris was on such a small wind loaded feature. We also found a knife hard icy crust with variable distribution near the surface around 1200m on SW faces. And sadly not nearly the new accumulation in the pass as we saw in Whitehorse - only 2-20cms of snow over a crust depending on wind exposure.</p>

Terrain Ridden

Mellow slopes.

Terrain Avoided

Steep slopes, Convex slopes.

Avalanche Conditions

Slab avalanches today or yesterday.

Whumpfing or drum-like sounds or shooting cracks.

Snow Conditions

Crusty, Wind affected, Powder.

Weather Conditions

Cloudy.