Quick report
- Aspect
- Northeast
- Red Flags
- Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 3170 m
- Slope Angle
- 24°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Today was full of contrasting observations. I had not seen the full spectacle of avalanches from the last cycle. Lots of north faces, but also a large southwest face from showoff to the bottom of the funnel through the forest between. This slide was surprising to me and makes me feel like there is something weird still in south facing mid elevations. However, I had no collapses, nor any cracking - first time in months in the La Sals. We dug a pit in a wind sheltered moraine test slope near to where we dug a pit and had a scary ECT failure on the December snow 2.5 weeks ago. However, despite identifying the Dec layer in a shovel shear test, we could not get any kind of failure on an ECT test this time. I gorilla slapped the shovel with 2 hands multiple times and couldn't get anything. This was really surprising. There was 190 cm of snow at the pit, so I think things are starting to bridge where the snow has stayed put. However, there are so many areas that have slid or that have wind features, that I think a lot of investigation needs to be done for every face skied. We have had so many cycles this year that the snowpack if very site specific. Areas that are thinner are more likely to react at the December interface, so I don't want to overplay this pit.</p>
Crown through the woods just observers right of the funnel connection to the Gold Basin drainage on a southwest aspect. I have never seen this area slide...
There is still an awfully nice shear plain at the top of the December snow. Sleeping demons await underneath our snow.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>We still have lots of facets from the December and October snow. Areas that aren't deep enough to bridge that instability might still fail and produce large dangerous avalanches.</p> <p>There is a lot of legacy wind effects on the snow and we noted several small wind slabs that pulled out with the last cycle. The storm moving in has some serious wind predicted, so new wind loading will probably be the main source of instability for triggering new avalanches. With the faceted layers that still exist, small wind slabs knocked loose could initiate a failure that steps down to one of persistent weak layers to create a large avalanche.</p>
There is still some pockets of soft in wind and sun sheltered aspects, but highly variable snow surface conditions