Stanley to Prairie Ck

Rain,warm temperatures, and sunshine are adding wet instabilities to an already fragile and unstable snowpack. While small, these wet slides will be dense, heavy, and pack a punch on their own — however they carry the likely possibility of stepping down to the persistent weak layer below to create an even larger, destructive avalanche. Remotely triggering a large persistent slab avalanche remains likely, and there is a lot of uncertainty around how the mositure, temperatures, and sunshine will affect our persistent slab problem. These complex conditions call for conservative travel and wide margins. 

 Driving south from Stanley, I was able to observe widespread surficial wet loose activity and warning signs such as pinwheels and roller balls on low and mid-elevation terrain.  Precipitation had fell as rain in all areas I traveled, including to the summit of Galena Pass, where the top 25cm+ of the snowpack was saturated with moisture as it was actively raining. Heading down to Cherry Ck then Prairie Ck, I traveled primarily on lower and mid-elevation terrain on several aspects and found the warm temperatures and active rain to have not only saturated the upper slab on top of 1/6, but to have stiffened it, adding density to the slab and likely multiplying consequence if one was to trigger a persistent slab avalanche. While the depth of this slab varied in the different aspects and elevations that I observed, it had the similar characteristic of becoming much stiffer, denser, and wetter than it was prior to our warm up and rain event. Rain continued to fall as I exited the field, suggesting this process would continue. Stopping on the north side of the pass on my way back to Stanley where the rain had stopped earlier, I was able to tell that while the upper slab was still stiffer than the day prior, moisture was already starting to drain from the upper portion of the snowpack.