Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
- Collapsing
- specific
The northerly wind event spurred another round of natural persistent slab avalanches over the past 2 days, highlighting that our snowpack is still sensitive and dangerous. Obvious signs of instability also continued below treeline in sheltered terrain.
Large collapses continue, mostly below treeline along with one booming collapse near treeline. Most of our route intentionally stayed on wind-eroded terrain lacking a slab or obvious signs of instability.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- moderate
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Strong northeasterly winds were blowing snow on Teo and a handful of other alpine peaks. Occasional extreme gusts with periods of intense transport. Proud windchill.
Snowpack
Crown investigation on an older slab that ran about a week ago on a S to SE aspect of Teo showed that the hard slab, which was about 50 cm thick, failed above the Christmas crust on a small (~1mm) layer of mixed forms (rounding facets) that was softer (4F) than the overlying slab. A stability test above the crown did not produce a result. We got close enough to the fresh crown on Teo to see that today's avalanche also had a similar snowpack structure, about a 60 cm hard slab that failed above the Christmas crust. Fresh wind slabs were a few inches thick where we traveled, and produced localized cracking across the drifts from a few feet to 10 feet or so.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2.5 R2
- Type
- HS
- Count
- 14
- Aspect
- SE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 13000 ft
At least a handful of persistent slabs ran in the past 36 hours from wind drifting. Two looked very fresh: a D2.5 hard slab on the S to SE side of Teo and and a D2 on a SW facing slope near Twin Lakes. There were several other large avalanches near Hunter Hill, Star Peak, etc, that also looked like they probably ran with the wind event, though harder to say for sure.