Northern Gallatin

From IG. “I spotted a large crown this morning on the E face of Bole. The crown appeared to be pretty deep, at least a few feet, and propagated quite wide. It also looked like there was a debris path coming down the apron of the E face of Hyalite peak, but I was too far away to know for sure.” N. Sramek

From IG. “I spotted a large crown this morning on the E face of Bole. The crown appeared to be pretty deep, at least a few feet, and propagated quite wide. It also looked like there was a debris path coming down the apron of the E face of Hyalite peak, but I was too far away to know for sure.”

I toured up to hyalite lake today to check out how the west facing walls in the main fork of hyalite  (hyalite lake drainage ) were stabilizing after last weeks wind.  On Friday I noticed “Provo’s run” (large path near overlook mtn) slid from the top which appeared to have slid due to the heavy wind loading.  The slid looked to be about 24” deep and ran full path .  So today I checked out the west facing walls close the hyalite lake and around 9500’ the upper sections of these slid paths were wind effected and unstable, and I did not ride them 

I dug a pit around 9500’ on the west facing wall near the lake and got unstable results.  ECTP 11 which propagated below the recent wind load from last week.

the snow pack is 240 cm deep and is nice and consolidated without  any major layers on several of the pits I dug at several elevations on these upper elevation west facing walls accept for the wind load on the upper elevations pits 

Apologies for the day-late observations. We skied in the Maid of the Mist area. We saw signs of several cornice drops, some of which resulted in small or medium size slab avalanches on steep terrain (see photo), and others that resulted in minimal sluffing (no photo). None resulted in a widespread propagation like what happened on Blackmore a few days ago. This seemed encouraging. There were many parties skiing the bowl. We then tried to ski out on the south side of the Maid. We stopped to dig a pit at 8800 feet on a NE facing slope before entering the gully. We did a few CT tests and the results were not encouraging. We moved moved 100 yards to a more East facing aspect, and got similar results. I included an annotated photo of the first snowpit wall. Every layer sheared cleanly: CT6 @ 6" below the surface, CT2 @ 12" below the surface, CT3 @ 14" below the surface, CT15 @ 20" below the surface, CT21 @ 30" below the surface. It was like peeling an onion ;-) We skinned back up and over to ski out the more common exit in the trees.

This gully on the south side of Maid of the Mist is really nice but it feeds into a scary terrain trap. I don't see it skied very often and I feel like that's probably a good thing. That's part of my reason for asking to not share these obs publicly, or maybe I'm just being selfish...?

From IG: Skiers near Mt. Blackmore on 2/24 saw a large avalanche on the east side of Mt. Blackmore that appeared to have happened in the last 24 hours.

From email 2/24/23: "Came across this very large cornice that appeared to have broken naturally sometime in the past 24 hours. Saw a few others that had broken recently throughout our tour, but none as large as this." E. Heiman