Quick report
- Red Flags
- Rapid Warming
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Unsure if this is truly rapid warming as temperatures have been slowly rising this week, but today temperatures have warmed significantly and we were finding plenty of dry snow underneath the various melt-freeze crusts.</p>
With an overall stable snowpack and the primary avalanche problem being wet snow issues, I was looking at the snow underneath the frozen crusts at the surface. On some steep south and west aspects, the crusts were 40-40 cms thick with damp grains underneath. However, on a south/southeast aspect at top of the Emma Ridges just below 10,000', Dave Richards (director of the avalanche program at Alta) got a collapse on a 10-cm (4") thick frozen slab on top of dry snow. The crack propagated about 60', and in a few different directions. What was interesting was finding such dry snow not too far beneath the snow surface. With warmer temperatures and strong sunshine forecasted, this introduces the potential for wet slab avalanches where the slab of wet snow fails on weak snow underneath.
Danger is Low in the morning, rising to Moderate by late morning as the snow surface takes on heat.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>The snow surface was solidly refrozen this morning clear skies and overnight temperatures well-below freezing. Timing is everything, and it's important to get off of slopes once they become wet. E-facing aspects began to soften around 10 am, and by the time we were exiting close to noon, west aspects were beginning to soften. With warmer temperatures forecasted overnight, slopes will likely soften even earlier on Friday morning.</p> <p> </p>
Some patches of dry snow can be found on upper elevation northerly aspects, but most slopes will feature some sort of crust.