Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading, Cracking, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>The presence of lots of red flags kept us on lower angle slopes with a few small exceptions</p>
We didn't observe much wind loading but deliberately stuck to slopes mostly sheltered from westerly wind with very little fetch to strip snow from. While we saw some cracking and bonding was poor, the bulk of the meadows chutes didn't really appear to have enough of a slab to support propagation. The slides in the area reported from yesterday were not especially large or long-running and were on steeper slopes and getting dragged through and over hard objects seemed more of a threat than being buried. Good example of variability - the snow we saw was not well bonded to the pre-storm snow, but was not heavy or cohesive enough to fail in a big way. In the words of my partner, "It wants to slide but can't quite make it happen". More loading, whether due to greater snowfall or more snow available for transport, would likely have caused very different behavior. It was a good day to keep slope angles down and embrace meadow skipping.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Recent storm snow is not very well bonded to old underlying snow</p>
Soft and only slightly consolidated, very thin on aspects that received significant sun and were partly or entirely dirt pre-storm, resting on dense moist base on less sun-affected aspects.