24-25

Remote trigger, SE facing slope, ~100' crown, ~3" depth.  Photo: M Gillies

While skiing at Lewis and Clark yesterday, I triggered a small wind slab (roughly 2ft rectangle) while traversing into the run with no propagation. While we skied the run, there was some pretty heavy sluffing. Much of the surface was wind-affected, with a dense top layer that broke through to a weaker, less dense layer. 

Had several large whumphs in windslabs at the top of bacon rind today. Interestingly they only started once a few inches of new snow had accumulated from the cold front. At the end of the day the windslabs are out there with enough load to make them pretty touchy.

No obvious signs of instability where there was no wind loading.

After skiing Bradley's Meadow, we skied north into Wolverine Bowl aiming to go up the backside of Texas Meadows. When we were in the large flat meadow to the north of Hourglass Chute we heard two avalanches come down from the ridge a few hundred yards north of Hourglass. Too low of vis to estimate size or see anything but the powder clouds come over the bottom cliffs. 

Skied big Ellis this morning. The temperature inversion was still active but not as dramatic as yesterday. The snow in the warm zone, near the top, of the inversion was well bonded and clearly affected by warmer temps. It was snowing hard up there but coming down as graupel. In the cold zone of the inversion the new snow was extremely active. We were remote triggering every small slope we passed on the gully exit. We saw many naturals breaking on any large open slope in the gully. The snow on the cold side of the inversion was blower but not bonding well at all. Could be a very sketchy setup if you find your self skiing in avy terrain that stayed cold over the last few days. 

Skied the East Meadows of Ross Peak, had about 4 inches of fresh snow come down in 2 hours. Lots of cracking and small storm slabs remote triggering on small rollovers on the way out. This was a small remote trigger next to the skin track, about 20 feet wide by 10 feet long. New wet snow seemed especially poorly bonded with the old snow below 7000 feet where the snow fell on very cold snow from affected by the inversion.  

New storm snow accumulating over the course of the morning became quite reactive once we descended out of the inversion.  Significant change starting around 7,200', where the surface had remained cold. We didn't observe any signs of instability while skiing between ~8,200' and ~7,200'.

Photo is a of remote trigger, SE facing slope, ~100' crown, ~3" depth.  Lots of shooting cracks and smaller remote triggers while touring out the FS roads. 

Toured up into the basin below Emigrant to take a look around. HS varied from about 30 cm in wind stripped areas to 100cm around 8000 feet. On a NE aspect at the same elevation we found about 4in of new snow over a slab sitting on a faceted layer, which did not move easily in a hand shear. Heard from another party that they had no results in a pit in a similar location. Large cornice formation on E facing ridge lines. We stayed down low and had great supportable skiing. 

I went for a walk up the main fork of hyalite today and observed a very dirty snow surface from the strong SW winds. Photo: Anonymous

 The cornices are growing rather large from the recent wind. Photo: Anonymous