Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Given the general lack of obvious signs of instability, it would be easy to confuse the snowpack as feeling stable here. Clearly not the case, evidenced by the pair of dangerous avalanches that we remotely triggered by riding across a shallow spot on a slope adjacent to the bowl on Baldy. The weak layer under the slab is unusually large-grained and soft compared to what I typically see when investigating 5'+ crowns. The snowpack structure is ugly.
Snowpack was generally quiet under our sleds; slabs are thick and supportive now. I noticed only three shooting cracks today, one when Eric got his sled stuck and was digging out near the ground in a gulley. The other when I rode through a shallow, wind eroded area near treeline. The last one was also while riding through a wind-eroded area and it triggered the two destructive slides in Baldy.Snowpack
Crown inspection of the SE-facing remotely triggered persistent slab. The deepest part of the crown was 9' feet thick, 1F hard, and failed on 4F- 1.5-2mm facets (January 5th layer). The shallower part of the crown was 4' thick, averaged 4F hard, and failed on F hard 3-4 mm facets. The crown averaged about 5 feet thick. The 1/5 interface here is facets above and below a crust of varying thickness. It appeared that the avalanche failed on the facets above the crust, but then plowed out the entire snowpack once it got moving, to the ground.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2 R3
- Type
- SS
- Count
- 9
- Aspect
- E
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 10200 ft
We remotely triggered a pair of destructive persistent slabs in the south bowl of Mt. Baldy (D2.5 and D3). We also observed a few more natural persistent slabs that appeared to run yesterday: D3 off the SW side of Gothic (reported yesterday), D2 near Meridian Lake, D2 near Red Lady Glades, and D2 on the East face of Schuylkill Peak. We also got our first look into the Upper Slate since the MLK cycle and there was evidence of many large to very large avalanches running throughout the storm.