23-24

We rode up to the Indepedence Mine area (outside our advisory area) to check out the snowpack conditions before the Poker Ride this Saturday. As we arrived in the basin we saw a good sized recent natural avalanche. This really tells you all you need to know - recent avalanches are the clearest sign that triggering more avalanches is possible.

We then dug and confirmed that the snowpack is just as weak as it is across our advisory area. Two feet of fist hardness facets at the ground with almost four feet of slab above them make for a very weak structure.

If you're headed up for the ride this weekend I'd advise avoiding riding on and staying out from under slopes steeper than 30 degrees. 

We toured to the east shoulder of Divide Peak today, 02/22/2024. We saw several natural avalanches on the north-facing terrain in Divide Cirque, below Hyalite Peak, and Overlook Mountain. These avalanches likely happened following a storm near the end of last week. Near the base of Divide, we dug on a SE-facing slope at 9300' and had a stability score of ECTP30. From here, we continued up the shoulder, trying our best to stay on slopes near 30 degrees in steepness. At the top of the shoulder on an east slope at 9600', we dug another pit and found 133 cm of snow and had a stability score of ECTP20. In both our snowpits, we had a well-defined layer of weak faceted snow buried 2-3 feet deep. This is the layer our stability tests failed on. 

During our tour, we saw no cracking or collapsing, but recent natural avalanches near us and the large natural avalanche seen on Mt. Bole a few days ago encouraged us to keep our terrain choices conservative. We skied down near our skin track one at a time and avoided areas with terrain traps like gullies, cliffs, and thick trees below. 

My brother and I toured into the skillet at Bacon Rind. We dug a pit at the top of the skillet, east aspect, 9000 feet. Total snow depth was 115cm. We observed CT14 and ECTP25, 2.5 feet or 75 cm down, propagating on large old facets below a hard slab. That slab was dense and carrying some energy when collapsed in our column tests. We also observed multiple suspected week old natural avalanches on northeast aspects.

Long tour up the Noble Fork yesterday. The two feet of recent snow have much improved travel conditions. I noticed no bullseye signs of surface instabilities, asides from some old crowns on a very steep, north facing slope at treeline (~9000'). There was also some localized collapsing in windboard at higher elevations, and lots of rollerballs releasing from cliffs with solar aspects. I did not have time for a pit, so focused on avoiding connected avalanche terrain, and the runouts of larger solar paths.

Photo of an avalanche observed yesterday (2/22) on the SW face of Sawtooth Mountain at about 10,600’. Looks to be a few days old, but hard to tell since all skier traffic from the weekend has been erased with Tuesday’s wind/precip. If you look closely, you can see the crown extends across the entire face.