Quick report
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>No red flags observed.</p>
I stumbled on this very small natural avalanche in Gold Hill that likely happened during the stormy period. This is a repeater slide, back on 2/21 a larger pocket was triggered by a sledder on this northeast aspect. This area has stayed shallow and still had dry weak snow when I looked at it today. My guess is heavy wet dense snow from this past week overloaded the shallow weak snow and triggered this slide? Quite possible there are a few areas that still have this shallow weak snow, but not a real high probability.
This is the Hwy at the Gold Hill road junction, last week you could drive a vehicle this far, but the storm put down close to two feet and its back to winter.
Cool and clear early this morning and the riding was fast and fun on a very supportable melt freeze crust.
Somewhere around two feet of new snow has fallen this past week and has settled out to a foot and a half in the Gold Hill area. A few different layers of changing densities and snow types and the new snow is bonding well to the old wet snow surface.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>The new snow has not yet had it's first big hit of warm spring sun, but there was some minor roller balls even on high north facing slopes from the day before. The snowpack felt kind of locked-up today with the clouds and cooler winds. Once the heat returns loose wet activity should spike as the new snow becomes wet and loose. </p>
Yesterday's heat put a crust on most aspects that was locked-up this morning with cool temperatures. The snow surface did not really soften up much today, the filtered sun did turn lower angle snow a bit damp. The best riding and turning I found was in the trees where the sun did not get a chance to crust things up.