Weather
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- light
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Continued light snow transport down in the valley from moderate winds in the morning. Periods of snow transport were visible in the alpine through the day.
Snowpack
We followed an old up track with other tracks in the area. There were no signs of instability along this route. HS averaged around 120cm on the up track. At 11,500ft, there was 10 to15cm of decomposing snow over older near-surface facets. The snowpack often lacked many dramatic or distinct layer changes while probing.
On our descent, we skied avalanche terrain that had previously produced a large avalanche on December 28th. The steep sections of the path had a firm bed surface with about 45cm of weak and mostly cohesionless snow. Interestingly, we didn't produce any sluffs. Perhaps there was a thin skin on the snow surface from previous cold winds helping keep sluffs at bay. The lower angled sections of the slope skied the best because the snow was a little more consistent, and you didn't occasionally bounce off the old firm bed surface.
Looking around, the most concerning terrain in the immediate area for triggering a slab avalanche looked primarily confined to near ridgelines where there was some recent or previous wind-loading and in more open areas that also had cross-loading.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Type
- L
- Aspect
- NE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 10800 ft
There was an old, dry loose avalanche that had run about 1200ft in the Climax Chutes. Decent visibility into some alpine terrain and no other avalanches were observed.