Steep Creek Avalanches

Avalanche date/time

Monday, April 25, 2022 at 11:55

Estimated occurrence time of avalanche

Less than 12 hours ago

Number of avalanches in this report

2 to 5

The size of avalanche

2

Avalanche Character

• Cornice only
• Loose wet
• Storm slab

Trigger type

Natural

Start zone aspect

• NE

Start zone elevation band

• Alpine

With the 30cm-ish in the high alpine and how steep and unsupported that terrain is above it could have simply been from loading, density, unsupported and climb in temps as the morning reached noon.

This has been a wild spring, April in particular. There is a ridiculous amount of snow in the alpine and it’s still been dumping on a complexity of layers that are now getting really saturated while new snow still comes down.

I can foresee a lot of activity, the sleeping buried later waking up over the coming weeks as of right now.

Trail-breaking was sluggish to the subalpine with the high density topping up until 1900m where the new lightened in density and travel became fairly easy. Travelled the lower ridge up to 2000m where we transitioned to ski our E-NE objective.

When I went to drop into the top of our line at 2000m on an east aspect I immediately did a ski cut and released all the storm snow that was on this very wet crust, not bonding at all.

I made a few quick short turns after that on a slope around 30 degrees and released another small slide. We continued but stayed low angle as we were committed to the bowl at this point (the next part was practically flat).

Below that we skied down slopes ranging from high 20 to high 30 as nothing was moving lower around 1900m and the storm snow accumulation was not as deep. Zero wind effected snow.

The slide reported above happened on a NE aspect though wasn’t related to the slope aspect, rather from the overhead steep exposure.