Quick report
The sun was in and out just enough to start to affect the surface snow ever so slightly. Otherwise we experienced intermittent snow and graupel showers with trace accumulation between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Winds were calm to light out of the West with no visible blowing snow in our immediate area BTL. We observed no signs of instability on our skin track. No cracking from skis and unremarkable hand shears in quick pits.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Type
- SS
- Aspect
- NE
- Trigger
- AS
- Elevation
- 9500 ft
We triggered 3 separate storm slab avalanches today in the Sherwins, below treeline (~9000’-9500’), on NNE aspects. We found another skier triggered slide from another party as well. They were all size D 1-1.5 and in poorly defined avalanche paths. The crowns were 12”-18” in depth. They appeared to have run at the interface of last night/yesterday’s snowfall and the previous fresh snow and not down to the harder layer beneath. The recent storm snow was slightly upside down. The largest of the three slides we triggered was 50’-75’ wide and ran 250’-300’. The debris was 2’-3’ deep. These slides were predictable in their behavior, they were very soft slabs (4F- to 4F hard), broke at our feet on short steeper rolls in the terrain, but ran faster than I expected.