Blue Hill. Feb.22 Avalanche incident site

Riding quality was:

Amazing

Snow conditions were:

• Deep powder
• Heavy
• Powder
• Wind affected

We rode:

• Dense trees
• Mellow slopes
• Open trees

We stayed away from:

• Steep slopes

The day was:

• Cloudy

Avalanche conditions

• Slab avalanches today or yesterday.
• Whumpfing or drum-like sounds or shooting cracks.

The south facing aspects of blue Hill have almost all avalanched since the weekend past. We found reactive wind slab on these slopes where wind deposited snow still remained. Shooting cracks, whoomphing, and easy results in our propagation test. The wind slab was failing on the first prominent temperature crust down 22 cm in our pit location at 400 m. We observed small facets on top of this crust, which lets us know this problem could linger around a while yet.

10-15 cm of new snow sitting over consolidated snow from earlier this week in the forest. Fantastic snowmobiling in wind protected areas.

Very poor visibility didn’t allow any bigger slope observationsor or travel.