Quick report
Minimal slab avalanche concerns; the only issue we encountered was sluffing. We targeted a leeward, east facing ridge with a moderate sized fetch looking for persistent slab issues, but slab formation there was only a few inches thick and extended a couple feet downslope. We felt comfortable traveling in steep terrain but had to use sluff awareness on longer pitches or more consequential slopes.
No collapses or cracking. Several skier triggered sluffs.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Snowpack
Old bed surfaces have about 20 to 45 cm of weak snow above the ground: typically 2mm facets and up to 4 mm near the ground. The 12/9 surface hoar layer is buried a few cm's deep below treeline.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Type
- HS
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- E
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 12000 ft
There was one small hard slab avalanche in Racoon Basin that ran sometime last week on an east aspect NTL. We skier triggered several facet sluffs on steep east and northeast aspects; the sluffs in Climax Chutes ran a ways down slope.