19-20

From e-mail: "Skied in the the beehive area today. Triggered some small wind slabs that were sliding on a crust. 

E aspect 9,100': Triggered from a stomping a small cornice, which landed on a steep slope below and popped a small wind slab.

NE aspect 10,000': Triggered while skiing through a choke point. This one was thin but ran down slope quite a ways because the terrain was steeper. It was easy to avoid by skiing off to the right, since the gully was just cross loaded a bit on the left.

SE aspect 9,800': The third was just some propagating cracks. The slope angle wasn't quite steep enough to slide here.

These instabilities appeared to be confined to areas of dense wind drifted snow on top of a crust layer and did not appear to be wide spread."

"I postholed up to Zach Attack today and dug a pit in the gully a few hundred feet below the route. We found about a meter of snow on the ground, the upper 65 cm being generally unconsolidated (fist-4F hardness) snow largely transported by the wind. Below that was a 5-10 cm MFcr on top of small (1-2 mm) basal facets. Higher up in the gully we found a few isolated winds slabs, and on the way my back down one of my partners felt a wumph as we crossed above a leeward convexity."

From obs., "Activity I observed was restricted to the new snow. A fair bit of loose snow....  Skiers on the E bowl of Blackmore triggered some D1 dry sluffage, running on a crust beneath the new snow.... No slab activity observed until the wind started pushing more snow around this afternoon. I watched a small (D1) wind slab build and fail as the wind picked up near the Blackmore/Elephant saddle (happened just before 2pm). Slab couldn't have been much thicker than 15cm, broke 30-40m wide. These slabs were building rapidly..."