Sleeping Beauty
Avalanchewhite.sydney · Dec 4, 2016 · Shames
Quick report
- Ride Type
- mellowSlopes, denseTrees
- Stayed Away
- steepSlopes, alpineSlopes, convexSlopes
- Riding Quality
- amazing
- Snow Conditions
- deepPowder
- Avalanche Conditions
- avalancheConditionSound, avalancheConditionSnow
Remote trigger of several medium-ish slides happened today. They didn’t run far, but did entrain nearby snow and continue to propagate downslope. Suspect it was on the nov 13th surface hoar.
Weather
- Wind Speed
- windSpeedLight
- Blowing Snow
- none
- Sky Condition
- brokenClouds
- Snowfall Rate
- 1
- Temperature Trend
- steady
- Precipitation Type
- snow
Snowpack
- Depth
- 210
- Obs Type
- point
- Site Aspect
- N
- Test Fracture
- unevenBreak
- Test Initiation
- hard
- Cracking Observed
- 1
- Site Elevation Band
- tln
- Surface Conditions
- newSnow
- Whumpfing Observed
- 1
- Test Failure Layer Crystal Types
- surfaceHoar, stormSnow
N aspect. Our pit today was 210cm to ground, easy and medium crumpling results in the snowstorm and hard results on the storm snow interface at about 40cm and slow progressive hard propagation on a 90cm column. Surface hoar down 80-100cm went on the 30cm columns in the hard range, not in the extended 90cm wide column. The surface hoar was somewhat decomposed compared two our pits last weekend, and weekend before at Shames. Soft unconsolidated storm snow, consolidated mid back. Faceting to ground last 40cm
Avalanche
- Run Length
- 100
- Slab Width
- 250
- Trigger Type
- skier
- Avalanche Size
- 2
- Trigger Sub Type
- remote
- Start Zone Aspect
- N, NE
- Vegetation Cover
- openSlope
- Start Zone Incline
- 30
- Avalanche Character
- persistentSlab, stormSlab
- Number Of Avalanches
- 2-5
- Start Zone Elevation
- 1300
- Weak Layer Burial Date
- 2016-11-13T20:00:00.000Z
- Avalanche Observation
- 12hrsAgo
- Weak Layer Crystal Type
- surfaceHoar
- Start Zone Elevation Band
- alp, tln
- Avalanche Occurrence Datetime
- 2016-12-03T14:00:00
No naturals or signs of instability initially today (prev local report of shooting cracks + whoompfing before). After an uneventful climb and switchover, I felt two whoomfps as our first party approached the slope, they arrived at the slope to see a 80cm to 1m crown which included a small part of our uptrack. We didnt see the slides move. Many large blocks, breaking up in the track, 200m wide from our view point, 100m long. Short 25-32 ish degree slope. From other view points we could see the crown followed other benches further downhill. There was also a shooting crack traversing a 20-25 degree slope for at least another 100m, that did not slide, connecting to a 25m long, 100m downhill on the same layer further west on a steeper slope. These remote riggers 100% happened while we there. We saw to other slides after and can't be sure if they were remote triggers from us. As we skied across the bed surface to the tighter trees of the ridge, we came across a different bowl (we hadn't seen before) which had slide nearly wall to wall, a >100 meters down and past the choke in the bowl to out of our view. Looked fresh, and we noticed that the top of the fracture approached the other 25x100m slide. On our ski down, we noticed that about 1km away on the same aspect, there had been wide slide (500m?) on a nearby peak. We can't be sure if this was new, we didnt notice it in the AM, but viz was in and out.