Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
It was a blustery, powdery day out there! I moved through a lot of wind affected terrain (both scoured and loaded and the space between the two), and kicked and cut at a lot of wind slabs. These were...generally unreactive. I also saw quite a few chunks of recent cornice that had collapsed naturally, in places triggering small slab avalanches below. In spite of the lack of widespread indicators of instability, I am treating the recent snow with respect, thanks to a lot of uncertainty involving the surfaces that it was deposited on. It would not have surprised me to see or trigger a slab that broke widely on a weak surface underneath the recent snow. Excellent skiing and riding in terrain sheltered from the wind. Cornices are huge, and have been loaded by SSE-S-SW-WSW winds for weeks. These would be "great" triggers for larger avalanches. I had a small amount of cracking that extended no more than a foot or two from my skis in heavily wind loaded terrain. I may have experienced two collapses of wind slabs along a low-angle, wind-loaded ridge, but the wind was blowing too hard to be confident/to hear. From safe locations, I ski cut and stomped at a number of steep, wind loaded slopes with no results.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- obscured
- Wind Loading
- moderate
Snowing S1-2 throughout the afternoon and after sunset. Moderate winds with strong gusts blowing out of the SW-W
Snowpack
Upper snowpack: 20" (50cm) of new snow since New Years. Some complexity in here as you travel up in elevation. Up to ~ 8,500' there is a aerated melt-freeze crust that formed during the first few days of the year on top of decomposing fresh snow on top of the 1/1 surface. Middle snowpack: whopping slab of very dense snow from December storms, with a few rain crusts, depending on elevation Lower snowpack: mid-November rain crust underlies facets that formed in late-November. This has been the primary avalanche maker all season. I did not dig down and look at this.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1
- Aspect
- NW
- Trigger
- NC
- Elevation
- 9500 ft
My visibility was limited by amount of and intensity of snowfall, I couldn't tell if natural avalanches had occurred in the drainage.