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Reactive wind slab in White Pass

Yukon Field Team, Wednesday 10th January, 2024 4:10PM
We ski toured to upper treeline elevations today as the temps dropped and the north winds picked up. As we climbed to our high point we observed some whumpfing and shooting cracks. Snow quality was being impacted by the wind in open areas but still quite good in sheltered features. We used low angle terrain features to build our uptrack and tried to avoid large overhead hazard as we were concerned about toe triggering wind slabs that could propagate well above us. We observed at least 5 new wind slab avalanches at both treeline and alpine elevations. These slabs were up to 45cm deep and propagated widely in some cases. They failed on soft, low density snow below the harder slabs. The wind did die back down after a couple hours and it was quite pleasant in the sun with temps in the -20C range. Surface snow has been wind pressed in many open areas.

Location: 59.73805000 -134.99326000