Seattle Ridge

We got a close look at the Widowmaker avalanche and confirmed it failed on a layer of well-developed, very weak facets. The crown was 3-4' deep on average, and connected terrain over a mile wide. We also saw 10-15 other D2-D3 avalanches behind the weather station and in Jr's Bowl. We saw a handful of smaller avalanches in Warm-Up Bowl and Triangle Bowl as we rode. We also noticed several new natural avalanches on the front side of Seattle Ridge and Pete's North and South that were not there Friday afternoon.

The snowpack is very dangerous right now. It was clear as we rode that almost all of the activity on the back side of Seattle Ridge had occurred where people had been riding. There are very few tracks out there so far, and start zones are looking very loaded. We know this is all sitting on a very concerning weak layer, and we got the feeling that there is a huge amount of terrain that hasn't avalanched yet but is just waiting for a trigger.

In addition to the well-documented avalanche on Widowmaker, probably 75% of the slopes behind the weather station into Jr's bowl had released at some point over the weekend. This ammounted to over a dozen D2-D3 avalanches.

We confirmed our strong suspicion— the December facet layer was the culprit for the Widowmaker avalanche, and likely most of the avalanche activity we've seen since Friday. This is a layer of advanced facets sandwiched between two crusts. It was buried about 3' deep at the crown of the avalanche we investigated, which is probably representative of a lot of terrain at Turnagain Pass.

There is a breakable crust up to the ridgetop. Most snow we found had been hit by the wind, but we did not ride very far into any of the back bowls because we were concerned of the high risk of triggering a big avalanche.