Aspen

Snowpack

The skin up was uneventful, but once we gained the ridge, instability was pretty obvious. Skinning along the ridge we noticed some shooting cracks and collapsing while breaking trail. We performed a ski cut across the top Riley 2 and remotely triggered a small slide below a small convex rollover maybe 100' downslope from the ridge (I'd say R1D1, maybe D2). Visibility was pretty terrible, but we also noticed a small natural avalanche (maybe R2D2) in Riley 3 that looks like it started at the interface between old snow and new snow, but stepped down to the ground and ran about a third of the way down the gulch; also broke on the rollover a hundred feet or so below the ridge; this natural looked like it happened recently. This was about noon today; the temp was 32deg on the ridge and was hammering wet, heavy snow. Pretty sketchy conditions