Concerning at Cokely

With the weather station showing 20 cm of new snow overnight, we excitedly headed down to Mount Cokely. We jumped on our sleds at the bottom of the pass main and motored up. We were surprised with how much soft new snow we found blown onto the road, up to 40 cm. At the top of the old ski hill, we dug a pit on a wind affected east aspect and found multiple moderate to hard results in our snowpack test with fractures extending across our 90 cm column. It was snowing all day and there were strong winds moving lots of snow out of the southeast. From here, we went for a walk on our skis and found that wind slabs were touchy and could fracture across entire slopes. We even had one fracture spread into an adjacent slope, causing a large avalanche. With this information in mind, we quickly modified our plan for the day and turned back to our sleds.