23-24

A snowboarder triggered an avalanche from 100' away after feeling a "massive" collapse. Photo: N. Mattes 

While splitboarding south of Cooke City today I remote triggered an avalanche. I stopped to transition, stepped into the snow, triggered a massive collapse and a slope about 100ft away slid. I stopped right there to dig a pit. HS 110, south facing, 9,000ft, non wind loaded slope. I got an ECTP 14 and an ECTP 13 both 60cm down, right at the top of the big ol facet layer making up the lower 50cm of the snowpack. 

Other than the remote trigger, lots of small loose dry natural avalanches on all aspects, mid and upper elevations. I also saw a few small D1 natural slab avalanches in the area on east and north facing aspects, mid elevation. Hard to tell when these all happened, but I'd guess within the last 24hrs. Flat light, hard to see definition Large collapses often and throughout the whole area, on and off established skin tacks. 

No signs or symptoms of reactivity, patient appeared stable on front(East) face. Unable to get further meaningful assessment on North East or South East 'couloirs'. Her chief complaint was being misrepresented/anthropomorphized as a coffee pot(percolating) and with a severe mental illness(bipolar). I assured the patient that everyone is now a pop psychologist or social engineer or both and the accusations were more a product of Freudian projection, having to do with unresolved mommy issues. Patient responded favorably to treatment and no further action recommended.

Skiing was good, 3x, although them rocks ain't getting any softer. Cheers, Bob 

We rode into Tepee Basin and stopped at a recent rider-triggered avalanche that happened on 02/07/2024, ob and video. This avalanche was very large in size, we estimated it to be 3/4 of a mile long, 3-4' deep and ran full path the flats below. The clouds parted long enough for us to seen the entire crown from afar, it was quite continuous and connected multiple smaller avalanche paths. 

We continued riding to the wilderness boundary. While walking down to our pit side we felt as large collpase and saw snow fall from the trees around us. Our snowpit was on a N facing slope at 9500'. Here, weak snow low in the snowpack is now buried about a meter deep. We got unstable results of ECTP26. While riding away from our snowpit and stepping off snowmobiles we again triggered a large collapse. Collpasing continued as we worked through the trees. 

From here we rode along the wilderness boundary towards another area to look for more recent avalanche activity. While crossing a flat meadow above a steep slope the rider breaking trail triggered an avalanche from 30' away. This avalanche broke several hundred feet wide, 2-3' deep and ran full path to the valley bottom. Additionally, around the corner we saw another recent avalanche that likely occured naturally within the last few days. 

Overall conditions felt very unstable today. Recent avalanches and collapsing were clear signs on instability. Even if we didn't see these signs of instability, knowing the snowpack is weak and has recently received a lot of new snow was enough information for us to plan to stay off of and out from underneath avalanche terrain today. 

The Bozeman Snow Ranger crew rode Buck Ridge today as far as Slatt's Hill/ 2nd Yellowmule.  At the bottom of the trail there was about 3" of new, low density snow, while up on top there was at least 6-10" of new snow from the last 24 hours or so.  There was no wind effect yet and there looked to be another wave of snow moving in from the SW as we were leaving.  We peeked into Beaver Creek and the Slatts area and did not see any recent avalanches though I did notice the snow settling significantly as I rode around on the flats in the Slatt's hill area- the SE facing basin opposite 2nd Yellowmule.   Plenty of fun to be had in the flats and gentle meadows right now.