Winter's Back!

Excellent riding conditions today with 15 - 20cm of blower new snow! We could hear avalanches coming down in the alpine when we were parked with the engines off below treeline. The winds were gusting at times from the south east up at treeine and moving the new snow into drifts and likely building cornices too. We dug down to look for buried surface hoar layers on a north facing slope at 2150m and found two layers, both of which reacted in our extended column test. One was down 50cm and the other down 63cm. With all this in mind we played it pretty safe and stuck to playing on small features only. We were happy we did, because one sidehill we made created a size 1 slab avalanche on a south facing slope. It failed on a layer of poorly bonded snow over a hard crust down 40cm. We also noted whumpfing while walking around our sleds and some shooting cracks while we were riding.