Quick report
- Cracking
- widespread
- Collapsing
- specific
The snowpack consisted of old faceted/frozen snow from the long clear period, covered in 1-2ft of light fluffy powder from the early part of the storm cycle over the past couple of days. Above treeline, this was topped by a wind slab that ranged from soft to super stiff depending on the aspect. This likely formed overnight when the winds really picked up. We experienced a LOT of settling and whumpfing. Who knows what the rain will do to this, hopefully it will fix it and make a more stable base.
Avalanche
We remote triggered a couple of size 1 wind slab slides on steep N/NE facing slopes at Heliotrope Ridge on Dec 2. We were traversing in safe terrain on shallow snowpack back onto the hogsback ridge coming down from the upper Heliotrope. A crack in the stiff wind slab propagated widely amd triggered the remote slides on two adjacent steeper faces.