Avalanche Discussion

my report from Dec 15th

www.turns-all-year.com/skiing_snowboardi...ex.php?topic=11524.0

Stevens has gotten 2-4 feet of light and dry since then, it has been cold since then, and now it's warming and dumping. I encountered at least three very week layers even then in what amounted to an overall dry snowpack except for the above freezing slush at the bottom. NOAA commentary is saying that this is the weakest (in general) snowpack in two decades. So these coming storms warrent a huge amount of caution and attention. From all the forecasts I've read it's a set up worse than last year.

-j

Anyone have more info on the slides on Friday at Hurricane Ridge that were mentioned on the NWAC report?

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Field reports received late Friday from the Hurricane Ridge area in the Olympics indicate that several skier triggered soft slabs were released, some running an estimated 800 vertical.
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IMO the Cascade snowpack is developing in a eerily similar manner to that which occured in the Kooteney/Revelstoke area in 2002/2003 (in which 19 people were killed in avalanches). During that season Canadian avi bulletins continued to warn of very deeply buried persistant weak layers, from late November. Keep a close watch on nwac's advisories and snowpack analysis; as digging pits to near ground level is above all else, impractical.

Just a few additions to BirdDog's post and a few other posts here. In 2003 the problem was layers that *weren't* deeply buried. ( BirdDog, maybe you meant "very deeply buried" relative to the total height of snow? ) The snowpack was much thinner than usual in 2003. As most people here know, the large fatality count in 2003 ( in BC ) resulted from two incidents in which a large number of people were simultaneously placed in harm's way. Either of these events could have happened in any year ( with any snowpack ) as recent events have shown.

It doesn't really matter if this year's snowpack is set up worse than last year's snowpack because no one here, myself included, is going to stop skiing. Therefore, the first line of defense is guarding against perceptual errors because such errors are always more dangerous than the state of the snowpack. Sorry to get metaphysical but the snowpack just "is". I mention this because there have been some pretty insane posts in the Trip Reports with respect to perception of instability ( along with some interesting errors and misconceptions being passed around in this thread. ) Perception of instability has not been mentioned once in this discussion so far. NWAC produces incredible forecasts but those forecasts are simply not applicable at the slope scale.

It doesn't really matter if this year's snowpack is set up worse than last year's snowpack because no one here, myself included, is going to stop skiing. ....

... NWAC produces incredible forecasts but those forecasts are simply not applicable at the slope scale.

What? They absolutely are. That's the idea!

I've got the next five days off to ski with a friend. We'll certainly be skiing, but we may not get onto the steeps at all...

The NWAC forecasts are not applicable at the slope scale. These products are applicable at the synoptic scale and sometimes at the meso scale, i.e. "in the general case" but not "in the specific case". NWAC forecasts are great but their bulletins do not include information about specific slopes. It is dangerous to rely solely on a synoptic scale or meso scale forecast when making decisions about a specific slope. ( That's why most people read the bulletin and integrate information about current conditions during their outings. ) Doesn't seem like many people on TAY make go/no decisions based solely on the bulletin because the trip reports show that lots of snowpack evaluation takes place during outings. Anyway, my point was that the actual state of the snowpack is much less important than making sure that perception of instability and reality of instability are aligned prior to decision-making.