Mammoth Mission

Quick report

Weather

cold

Ride Type

denseTrees, openTrees, mellowSlopes

Stayed Away

convexSlopes

Riding Quality

ok

Snow Conditions

windAffected, crusty

Avalanche Conditions

avalancheConditionSound, avalancheConditionSlab

Chose to head for the mammoth summit because it can be nice and ridgey if you approach it right. Found super variable snow at all elevations with varying patches of wind scour, wind slab and soft snow. Sporty at the top. Because there were four of us we dug two pits at around 1800m on a west facing aspect about 10m apart and performed an ECT in each. We were looking for the surface hoar layer and wanted to see how much it propagated. Pit 1 had a failure across the column 40 cm down at 16 hits on old surface hoar, while pit 2 had a small fracture at 19 hits that did not propagate across the column. This failure was also on surface hoar. We concluded it was super hard to tell where it was touchy so proceeded with caution the rest of the day. Towards the bottom we skirted a tighter gully high riders right, and witnessed the riders left of the gulley trigger remotely with the crack running 50-75m. Thankfully it didn’t go anywhere, seemingly because it was well supported. Two close calls in two trips out... think we need to dial it back a bit.