Front Range
Avalanchechase courington · Jan 22, 2016 · Front Range
Weather
very sunny, little to no wind, air temp probably around 20, ~2:30pm when we noticed the debris. southeast aspect on russell.
Snowpack
wind and sun affected. ~6" in last 48hrs with winds in 30mph range previous day, 2 days since snow. southeast faces were getting very loaded. we didn't dig any pits, but from poking around it felt like there is a pretty solid ~3-4" wind slab over the recent storm slab on most E-SE aspects. northern aspect snow felt much lighter, less cohesive, deeper.
Avalanche
it appeared a skier or 2 dropped the shoulder of russell just a bit above TL and at around TL (~150' of descent) there was an area that it appeared someone had stopped. just about 10' from this spot there appeared to be tracks into the crown. it appears that this was the trigger point and the fracture propagated around the face to the south. crown appears to be connecting triggers (rock/tree/thin cover) and appears anywhere from a few inches - ~3' deep. it was hard to tell if anyone was buried so we proceeded down our intended route and toured over to the bottom of the debris to search for a signal. none was found and no evidence of burial so we headed out. the slide is big, it didn't travel very far down, but the breadth of the propagation is large and hard-slab debris are large, some the size of cars and trucks.