20-21

We had a great tour, dug a pit on the East Side of Flanders BTL around 8700. Overall the snowpack seemed fairly stable, finding no signs of instability while skinning. But, we definitely found a concerning crust at 160 cm that was very thin on the NW slope we dug on, but noticeably stouter and shallower on a more southerly slope we skinned to. We had two failures in our ECT, both with no propagation outside of the shovel width, one ECTN16@185cm with medium-poor fracture quality. The other was ECTN23@160cm right under the small crust; it had medium fracture quality, no propagation. W had no other signs of instability, just minor sluffing in the top 10cm while skiing. We dug 120cm total of 205, all of it was dry. Great skiing today!

I and one friend observed the remains of a natural avalanche below the north facing headwall up Flanders creek. It looked as if it happened within the past few days. I didn’t get close enough to really gauge the size in width but it propagated at the ground. The crown looked to be 3’-4’ deep. We tucked tail and ran after we saw this and didn’t investigate further.

Skied Mount Blackmore today. There was a lot more new snow than expected (6-8") and ridgetop winds were strong and gusty. Snow along the ridgelines and on E-facing slopes was touchy. Lots of cracking and collapsing. Dug a quick pit on a SE face at 9600ft and had a reactive density change within the recent new snow about 20cm down from the surface.

Saw a natural avalanche on Alex Lowe peak just south of the Hellmouth, and 4 skier triggered slides on the E face between the Blackmore and Alex Lowe Basins. Most appeared to be wind slabs, but around 1 pm a skier remote triggered a deep slab from ~50 feet away (around the corner lookers right in the attached picture). Broke at the ground, 10-15feet deep, and took out a small tree.

Observation from Electric Peak on 3/26/21.

From obs: "...I did get one small slab to pull on the crust layer on an E aspect at 8000’, so the snow has proven to not be uniformly well-bonded..."

Photo: S. Reinsel

From obs: "On Friday, my partner and I went into Middle Basin with the objective of skiing Middle Peak, and possibly the short couloir that splits the face. That morning we dug a pit on the east facing aspect of the beehive/middle basin ridge (ECTx). Encouraged by our results, we continued on to the base of middle peak and dug another pit (ECTp 30) on the south-facing ice crust.

On Friday, my partner and I went into Middle Basin with the objective of skiing Middle Peak, and possibly the short couloir that splits the face. That morning we dug a pit on the east facing aspect of the beehive/middle basin ridge (ECTx). Encouraged by our results, we continued on to the base of middle peak and dug another pit (ECTp 30) on the south-facing ice crust. We continued on to summit middle peak and ski down the face to the entrance of the couloir, we descended 20ft into the entrance on soft loose snow and dug our third pit (ECTx), we replicated our results and decided the feature would be safe to ski. At ~1pm the first skier descended the slope, and triggered a small windslab (4-8in and 20ft wide) about 100ft down the slope and skied away uncaught. Skier 2, descended a lower angle slope to the east.