On A Steel (Race)Horse I Ride

Today we rode our steel ponies out to the Racehorse Peak. We parked our sleds in mature timber, well away from any overhead hazard, and proceeded on foot to the ridge of Racehorse peak at 2300 m. From the ridge we observed several natural persistent slab avalanches, likely triggered by ongoing intense wind loading over the last 12-48 hours. The avalanches ranged from size 2.5 to size 3.5, and had depths up to 250 cm in heavily wind loaded start zones. On our egress, we made a stop at Window Mountain to observe the largest avalanche we saw on the day. This avalanche displayed wide propagation, and high destructive potential, running full path and into a common "rest" or "regroup" area. It has a significant amount of mature timber in it's debris. The snow depth at 2300 m on race horse ridge on a N aspect is 180 cm, with 80 cm of recent snow sitting above a supportive crust. Below this there is a well settled snow, on top of another melt freeze crust to ground. We had no results on our stability tests in the snow pit, but observed recent large avalanches. We received trace amounts of snow through the day, and the skies were mostly cloudy. However, the big story was the wind. The wind was strong at ridge top in the alpine, and moderate in the treeline and below treeline. We watched as slabs and cornices actively built through the day.