Robinson Remotes

Today we rode into Robinson to check out the zone, the early January surface hoar, facet, crust complex and its reactivity to the warming temperatures. With warm temperatures and significant new snow load over this layer the danger rating was High in alpine and tree line and we treated it as such by traveling in very simple terrain and avoiding avalanche terrain. At 900m all signs of the recently groomed trail were gone under 35+cm of new snow. While poking around meadows trying to find our way to the cabin we remotely triggered a small slope from 100m away producing a healthy size 1.5 avalanche. In an attempted extended column test our column failed immediately upon cutting all three sides down 70cm, no taps needed. This warm storm slab and our extended column test failed on the early January surface hoar layer down 70cm although the crown depth was over 1 meter on wind loaded portions of the slope. This is certainly a precursor of whats to come for any location holding this January layer with the incoming warm temperature in the region. The sledding was extremely deep and with these observations we decided to save ourselves a wet day of digging sleds out of holes and turned tail back to the valley bottom.