General Observations

Riding out of Maclaren Lodge- Handle bar deep snow on Saturday. In the valley there was about 2-3 feet of fresh powder that had fallen over the last week, with 3+ feet of sugar under the fresh powder. Incredibly touchy conditions. We remote triggered at least 2 smaller avalanches, and had shooting cracks all over the place. Small cornice pieces breaking off as you rode up to them, it was incredible for an avalanche class. We stayed on the valley floor and rode the swamps and river drainages near the lodge all on very low consequence terrain.

Sunday was a 180 degree difference with windblown snow everywhere & Maclaren Lodge had logged 37MPH wind gusts Saturday night. We preformed a couple of snowpit tests. Compression Test failed easily with only a few hand taps. The layer that broke off was the freshly windblown snow (about a foot down). One of our ECTs failed at the ground on the extremely sugary snow at the base (3+mm Depth Hoar) with full propagation and a sudden collapse. The other ECT failed on the freshly windblown layer but did not propagate across the entire block. We concluded it is going to be scary out there until the spring melt-thaw cycles.