CAIC

Details

Weather Description: 6am skies were mostly cloudy. Very lite snow on and off to around 10 am. Winds picked up out of the west south west and snow began to blow over the ridge top and deposit rather quickly around 11 to 12am. My skies had a half inch layer of snow that accumulated in the 30 minutes it took to dig a snow pit.

Snowpack Description: 165cm pit. 11,800ft. East Northeast aspect. 0-10cm depth hoar, very faceted crystals easily scooped with hand. 10-20cm pencil hardness. 20-100cm 1 finger hardness snow. 100-120cm pencil hardness. 120-135cm 1 finger hardness. 135-160 4 finger snow with a 5 cm 1 finger layer on the surface. Was hard to get anything to collapse and propagate in ECT.

Avalanche Description: Skinned from snow pit back to isolated steeper sections where I ripped skins and rode 25 to 28 degree slopes to the bottom of the Shrine bowl. At the bottom I looked back up and saw that an avalanche had occurred. The slide happened within 100 feet of my route on both accent and decent. Not seeing the slide occur it's hard to say weather it's natural or I remote triggered it. R1 D1. Crown up to 2 feet, average 1 foot. 55 feet wide and ran only 50 vertical before slope mellows back to around 20 to 25 degrees. While on shrine ridge I saw another small R1 D1 slide across the Wearymen creek on the north east face ridge line of Ptarmigan hill. Both slides occurred between 9am and 12pm.

Date

Location/Path

Elev

Asp

Type

Trig

SizeR

SizeD

2017/11/24 ^†