Observation: Butler Fork

Went back to the same area in Butler Fork I was in on Monday, and was a bit surprised by all the large collapses and cracking we initiated. When we were there Monday I could've sworn that we collapsed every part of the slope you could and didn't expect much today. This just shows you how fragile our snow pack is at the moment, all I took was 5 inches of light density and a little wind to make things somewhat hair trigger and unstable again. The slope we were skiing is a slide path at around 9200ft which has a steep but short upper bowl and a long low angle run out. We were trying to gain the ridge today but the higher you get the steeper it gets and the cracking and collapsing was telling us to bail and skip the ridgeline. I don't think you could've triggered a large avalanche in this path righ now due to lack of snow and uncovered terrain features but triggering any size slide on the ascent is a bad call in my opinion. The collapsing continued all the way down the lower angled aspen glades to the valley floor.

photos: cracking and collapsing on NW and NE and a small pocket that pulled out down by the creek

Seemed like storm totals were around 5 to 6 inches in upper Butler Fork. The S was getting just a little damp in the afternoon.