Vail & Summit County
AvalancheAnonymous · Mar 21, 2020 · Vail & Summit County
Weather
The weather was sunny with a few intermittent clouds. Temps were in the mid-teens, however in direct sunlight the snow and ourselves felt much warmer.
Snowpack
On the skin up the mountain, snow conditions mostly consisted of 2-4" of new snow on top of hard pack. These observations were mostly taken via ski pole tests. Once we reached the couloir around 12,400 ft. we entered the skiers right hand branch which is steeper than the more popular left branch. The couloir is almost entirely NE facing in aspect. The entrance is lower angle then gets steeper, I took a few cut turns and pushed on the storm slab to get a general feeling if the storm slab would slough. I went down to where the snowpack began to steepen and dug a pit and then ran a shovel test. The snow near the top was consistent of a thin wind/ sun crust covering about 3-5" of powder followed by all the previous storm cycles that culminated in a hard packed column. The storm slab compressed under wrist taps obviously, but then I moved into the elbow taps. A layer roughly a foot down broke on my 7th elbow tap. I was skeptical though because when freeing the back of the column without a snows I believe I weakened the layer inadvertently. Rather than digging another pit in a popular ski route and not seeing much propagation in my pit test I opted to take a few more ski cuts. The snow felt great with limited sloughing when applying a lot of energy via ski cuts into the snowpack.
Avalanche
As we skied down the snow became softer and more powdery. The slight wind crust on the skiers right entrance cracked which was disheartening so we moved over the the left branch and made our way down. The heat was definitely starting to effect the snow pack as time progressed and we moved down in elevation. Just before half way down, my ski partner pushed a decent sized storm slab slough downhill. We discussed how we would proceed and decided that moving quickly would be prudent with the heat starting to give the storm slab more weight. My partners skied down the next section and into a safe zone. When I headed down to them I caused some storm slab to break away then skied over a buried rock which triggered some propagation. I skied out of the moving storm slab and as the storm slab moved downhill it gained momentum and mass. This ended up taking out almost all of the storm slab within the remaining couloir and near the bottom it looked to have stepped down to the lower layer and gouged some areas of the snowpack.