New Stability Test

Caught this in today's av report, Bruce Tremper demonstrating the extended column test which looks for both initiation and propogation in a column of snow to help determine stability. It seems to give a better inidcation of whether or not a failure will propogate accross a slope.

There are several versions of this test, but there is not as yet general agreement on what it means. I suspect that Jamieson's categorization of Rutschblock tests by degree and nature of failure is really the same information. this from ISSW

Thanks, Mark.
That test makes a lot of sense to me.