Skier triggered slide on 10/26 at Bridger Bowl near the top of Pierre's Knob lift. Photo: @taitbigmoneyswan
Skier triggered slide on 10/26 at Bridger Bowl near the top of Pierre's Knob lift. Photo: @taitbigmoneyswan
Beautiful skiing today out in Beehive. I skied the SW couilar that empties down into the basin a couple of times, pretty sure it has a name but I’m not sure what it’s called. Then dropped off the back side and skied a N facing shot into Bear Basin and skinned back up the N side of the ridge and came back out to the Beehive trailhead. I found very stable conditions with only about 2” of new snow on the older crust, up to 10” where the wind blew it in. The S facing stuff was dreamy, well bonded, I dug several pits and got nothing, ECT X. The snow on the ground is very warm and rotten and full of water. The ice on the ground isn’t even frozen. The new snow only reacted once in a very small plate shaped crack coming off my ski as I was skinning. I jumped around as hard as I could in a few different places and even where it was wind loaded and I couldn’t get anything to move even a little bit. Between the most recent crust, which is very supportable, and the new snow is a layer of graupel. The new snow is super cold on top and the snow on the ground is super warm! There is 2-4’ of snow where I was and only about a foot lower down. Wind affect is really obvious, there are ripples and signs of loading everywhere. I avoided several tempting looking lines because of obvious wind slabs and heavy loading. The wind slabs are more prevalent on the N facing stuff. When we dropped onto the N facing shot, it was way slabbier and firmer on the surface from the wind. It’s a nice combination of wind scoured and wind slabbed but still couldn’t get anything to move. Also no signs of natural activity anywhere, not even point releases on the sunny slopes.
Today I skinned in and skied around the E side of the N ridges coming down off of Blackmore. The snow is about 2’ deep off of the ridge down to the bottom of the bowl on the east faces, with variations where the wind has loaded/stripped the snow. The wind was gusting out of the N/NW/W. I observed some natural loose dry sluffs on the N face and the E face off the N ridge. They look like they came down in the last 24 hours with this new snow and wind; they were still fairly defined when I saw them.
Wind-drifted snow avalanched naturally in a few areas of the northern ranges yesterday (10/23). This photo was near Fairy Lake in the Bridger Range. Photo: B. VandenBos
Wind in the last 36 hours left a fingerprint of ripples near Fairy Lake in the Bridger Range. Photo: B. VandenBos
A skier on Mt Blackmore "observed some natural loose dry sluffs on the N face and the E face off the N ridge. They look like they came down in the last 24 hours with this new snow and wind; they were still fairly defined when I saw them." Photo: Jeanine Dalimata
Thin down low but powder up high. Today I skinned in and skied around the E side of the N ridges coming down off of Blackmore. The snow is about 2’ deep off of the ridge down to the bottom of the bowl on the east faces, with variations where the wind has loaded/stripped the snow. The wind was gusting out of the N/NW/W. Very powderific up there! The trail coming out is pretty exciting right now.
I did a tiny ECT in a pit I dug about 20’ down from the saddle that belongs to that little ridge that shoots off N of Blackmore proper summit. The saddle to the lookers right as you first gain the bowl on the trail coming in. The snow was about 2’ deep and I got a Q3 shear on ECT 26. There’s a rotten layer about 4” off the ground where the shear occurred. I observed some natural loose dry sluffs on the N face and the E face off the N ridge. They look like they came down in the last 24 hours with this new snow and wind; they were still fairly defined when I saw them. I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect these kinds of loose dry sluffs to persist with the incoming storm; areas where the snow has been loaded onto cliffy areas have been showing a lot of activity. Pretty much any nice looking, nicely angled snow loaded couilar or gulley on these aspects is likely to react even without a skier trigger based on my observations from this past week and what I saw today.
From Doug Chabot:
Today I turned around on the approach to an ice climb on the north face of the Sphinx. Cracking in the windblown snow was a sign of things to come. At the first wind-loaded gully I crawled on my hands and knees over to the slope and whacked it with my ice axe. It avalanched. Although it was only 4" thick, it propagated 75 feet above and scraped the snow over a cliff. We opted to not tempt any more slopes and went home.
From an observation:
...we were out in Frazier Basin today and noticed some activity. While skinning up a south face we found a couple isolated wind pockets that propagated the top 2-3”... nothing slid. We did also found some couloirs that had storm slabs that had ran in the last few days, both south and north aspects.
From another observer:
Increasing wind speeds overnight and during the morning were easily transporting snow and building thin, stiff slabs. Slab formation was most intense along ridgelines but there were some thin, mid-slope slabs present on cross-loaded terrain features. Lots of loose issues, particularly as the sun was warming things up.
