Fraser Chutes

Possibly 30+ cm new snow in last 48 hours, hard to tell. Lots of fresh powder, but a worrying weak layer at one metre deep that failed on a mellow slope with a wide propagation.

We chose slopes 20 degrees and under to climb, knowing that there was quite a bit of new snow and that the air temperature was warmer than we had anticipated (-3 C). We noticed whumpfing and shooting cracks on our skin. We moved a bit further to evaluate the snow on a more open slope. We reached an open 20 degree slope and one skier skinned onto the slope. There was a large whumpf which was felt by the other skier about 15 metres away. We noticed cracks along the edges of a large swath of open slope, as much as 30 metres above the skier who caused the whumpfing. We wanted to see what layer the snowpack failed on, so we dug a pit. The upper snowpack was new snow from the past week or so of storms, steadily increasing in density. There was then a very thin layer of facets over a crust at 1m deep, 40cm off the ground. Below this was crusty and large, sintered, icy chunks. We did a which did not show propagation but did fail unevenly at 4, 6, and 14, each at about 10 cm below the shovel. Knowing this result did not show us what layer had failed, we cut out a two-metre block on the same 20 degree slope which had a sudden failure with one light jump of a skier on top of the block. This failure was on the layer of facets above the crust at 1m deep and failed along the whole column. The shallow slope angle prevented the block from moving. We limited our skiing to very shallow slope angles for the rest of the day.