Carnarvon wind slabs

Quick report

Weather

cold, windy

Ride Type

sunnySlopes, alpineSlopes

Stayed Away

convexSlopes

Riding Quality

ok

Snow Conditions

windAffected, powder

Toured up to Top Hat today. Cold in the parking lot at 8:30am (-30C) but once you got moving up the skin track it didn't feel too bad. Once we got to Hamilton Lake the winds picked up in the moderate to strong range coming from the NE which made for a very chilly ascent up to the Top Hat col. We could see many recent point releases and thin wind slab avalanche debris off the steep slope on Carnarvon shoulder on the way up. From the col, the big east face of Carnarvon had numerous fresh wind slab releases. One of them (see photo) looked to be a size 1.5 or 2. Just before skiing down we observed a small size one coming down off this same face as well as a pretty big one coming off the Vice president across the valley. In summary, lots of wind and avalanche activity in steep areas in the alpine today! The skiing in the main bowl was mostly nice light faceted powder but there were some variable areas of wind effect in places