Touchy conditions E of highway

We spent Saturday (Feb 24) poking around in the Big Blue valley, big scary whumps all day and a few of them caused small slides on micro terrain. The biggest was a size 1 on a steep SE facing wall of a large canyon. I skinned out onto steeper terrain than I thought in the white light and as I realized I shouldn't be there, I got a big long wumph and felt the snow start to move. I was able to turn and get a few steps down before the snow started to pile up on my uphill ski. Scary moment, and lucky there wasn't more energy in that small feature as I just had to dig out my ski. The main crown was ~20m across and 20-50cm deep, and slid on facets over a icy, but decomposing crust. Near the bottom of the bed you can see that it stepped down through a couple of smaller crust layers. Pretty scary how large some of the debris was on such a small wind loaded feature. We also found a knife hard icy crust with variable distribution near the surface around 1200m on SW faces. And sadly not nearly the new accumulation in the pass as we saw in Whitehorse - only 2-20cms of snow over a crust depending on wind exposure.

We also saw similar sized natural slides off of convexities into gully features on SW faces.

We spent Saturday (Feb 24) poking around in the Big Blue valley, big scary whumps all day and a few of them caused small slides on micro terrain. The biggest was a size 1 on a steep SE facing wall of a large canyon. I skinned out onto steeper terrain than I thought in the white light and as I realized I shouldn't be there I got a big long wumph and felt the snow start to move. I was able to turn and get a few steps down before the snow started to pile up on my uphill ski. Scary moment, and lucky there wasn't more energy in that small feature as I just had to dig out my ski. The main crown was ~20m across and 20-50cm deep, and slid on facets over a icy, but decomposing crust. Near the bottom of the bed you can see that it stepped down through a couple of smaller crust layers. Pretty scary how large some of the debris was on such a small wind loaded feature.