Big John Bowl
Observed Nov 24, 2018, 12:45 p.m. PST · south-columbia
This report was submitted with an older form.
Avalanche report
- Comment
- I want to give a huge high five to his two friends that were first on scene that located him and got him half unburied. If it wasn't for them we would have lost a soul in the mountains today. We were approached by a rather frantic dude stating that "he just got buried". We rushed over and dropped into Bog John to find 2 guys digging up a man and multiple fully buried sleds. I hung out and helped with the buried man seeing he was only half out when I arrived. It was hard to get a solid answer out of the crew if they knew if anyone else was buried, so we kept searching, with mixed signals (people kept arriving with their transceivers in send). After a couple of minutes we realized that the coast was clear and quickly left the area and the remainder of the crew dug their snowmobiles out. Not 100% sure what the story was but what I understood from the multiple people talking was that there was multiple people on the slope at once sidehiling, which is what triggered the propagation of a crack then slab to slide. It was a north facing wind loaded slope that was about 45 degrees and ripped right to the ground. My guess of what caused the slide was the faceted snow at the ground (big fluctuation in temperature in a short period of time). Very happy everyone walked away uninjured and alive.
- Trigger type
- Snowmobile
- Wind exposure
- Lee slope
- Avalanche size
- 3
- Trigger sub type
- Accidental
- Start zone aspect
- NW
- Vegetation cover
- Open slope
- Avalanche character
- Loose dry, Persistent slab, Wind slab
- Number of avalanches
- 1
- Weak layer burial date
- 2018-11-20T20:00:00.000Z
- Weak layer crystal type
- Surface hoar and facets
- Start zone elevation band
- Alp
- Avalanche occurrence datetime
- 2018-11-24T12:17:00