Pleasantly Surprised on The Throne

Today, we rode up to The Throne for the first time this season. We parked at the motorized boundary and toured up the east face. The road riding was good but there were certainly more dirt patches on the way out, than in, with the warm temps.

We dug two pits on the east face as we ascended. At 7950' we had HS: 78, ECTN13 + 23. At 8140', we got HS: 97, ECTN 30. We toured up the ridge and moved over onto a north aspect. There we got HS: 94, ECTN 30. We observed no cracking or collapsing. Weak layers still exist at the bottom of our snowpack, but we were happy to find that these weak layers in the Bridgers seem to be not quite as weak as in our other zones.

We had good visibility and were able to get eyes on two avalanches that occurred naturally during the major wind event yesterday in the bowl south of Naya Nuki. The largest of which was a R2-D1.5 that broke in the new snow. We also got eyes on a natural avalanche (R2-D2.5) that occurred yesterday on Saddle Peak.