Observation: Snowbasin Backcountry

There was some good snow to be had... predictable sluffing. Sheltered locations from 9000 to 8000 were the best.

Here is a fresh sluff, with some rock hard old wet slide debris, which came out of the Toilet Bowl area. There were many large wet slides that I have not seen before, since I have not been out for a week or so. There was a major slide in Hells that ran over 1000 feet.

Since things were pretty stable, and we had some fresh snow, we decided to check out Scary Larrys off the west side of Mt Allen. After hitting dozens of rocks getting there, we had a 1000 feet of very good turns. This chute always seems to have some steeper sections lower down, which tend to be sun crusted. The coverage is so thin now, that there were some shockingly steep sections (45 to 55 degree range) with stout rain crusts, and just a few inches of new snow on them, below 7000 feet. We had to rappel one rock band with some water ice flows. Much more serious hard crusts than we expected.

Here are some more old wet slides in Scary Larrys, these concrete-like hard chunks must be avoided.

There was less new snow than I was expecting, with a reported storm total of 13", and 8" in the past 24 hours. On steeper slopes, especially lower elevation (below 7600') it felt like dust on stout crust.