Recent Avalanche, Active Loading in Cooke City

Today, we rode up to the base of Henderson and toured up to the bench to check out the crown of an avalanche that occurred yesterday. The avalanche was remotely triggered by a skier from 50' away. It was about 100' wide, ran 50' vertical, and the max depth of the crown was 2.5'. It fractured on the interface between the new storm snow and faceted grains. This was a heavily wind loaded area with an HS of 179cm. Strong westerly gusts and heavy snowfall had nearly refilled the crown by the time we left. 

We then traveled further up the bench to a north facing aspect and dug again. Here we got an unstable test result, ECTP 13, on a layer of buried surface hoar. Faceted snow exists at the base of the snowpack but our main concern on non-wind loaded slopes is layers of surface hoar and near-surface facets buried about 50cm deep. It was snowing and blowing throughout the day, and with continued loading, we expect to see collapsing, cracking and signs of instability tomorrow.