Mt. Judah

As soon as we left the vehicle, we noticed deep new snow that felt mostly right-side-up with denser snow on the bottom and softer snow near the surface. We could feel the rain crust near the bottom of the new snow as well. Ski kicks and ski cuts on small, steep test slopes triggered sluffs of soft storm and a few small shooting cracks. The sluffs entrained the top 6 to 8 inches of new snow. The cracks did not propagate more than three to four feet away from my skis.

Cornices above these test slopes broke easily with ski kicks or even just tapping them with poles. Some of them propagated up to 20 ft. When the cornice pieces fell onto the slopes below, they triggered loose snow sluffs like the ones mentioned above but did not trigger slab avalanches. We could see very large cornices looming over the larger slopes below the summit ridge, but clouds and blowing snow made seeing any details on the slopes below impossible.

Cornices broke easily, but signs of slab development in the new snow were limited to shooting cracks up to four feet long in both wind-affected and wind-protected terrain. Ski cuts easily triggered six to eight-inch-deep sluffs of new snow on steep test slopes.