W Smokys

Beautiful, cold winter day. Another day of chasing soft snow on solars before the sun cooked it. We found cold snow throughout the day by shifting from SE to S to SW, but these aspects definitely took a crust by the end of the day, unfortunately. Steeper slopes were getting a more thorough cooking, we saw a few very small dry/moist/wet loose slides occurring on steep, rocky, south facing slopes at middle elevation. It was apparent that winds had picked up overnight and moved some snow, building a fresh round of thin but stiff slabs on some upper elevation slopes and decreasing ski quality in places. Wind direction was a little weird, more of a NE to it where we were located today. This was recorded on the upper Vienna wx station. We also spotted a few notable slab avalanches out in the W Smokys (see photos). Both appeared to have failed in the past 48 hours. These had very clean crowns and failed somewhat widely, flanking out and collecting a decent bit of snow. Traveled through a lot of untouched snow. We experienced one notable collapse, at the floor of a drainage around 7,800'. There was no associated surface cracking visible, and it felt like it occurred a bit deeper. Suspect we collapsed a layer of surface hoar buried at the late December drought surface (buried on 1/1, down 2.5 feet). We experienced minor cracking in fresh, hard wind slabs. We saw several sizable slab avalanches that appear to have failed in the past 48 hours.

W Smokys

Quick report

Weather

Snowpack

Avalanche