- Submitted by
- She Shreds Mountain Adventures
- Observations date
- Saturday, November 24, 2018 at 20:45
- Location
- 50.245260° N 117.069870° W
- Reporting on
- Snow conditions
/-117.06987,50.24526,8,0,0/1026x200?access_token=pk.eyJ1IjoiYXZhbGFuY2hlY2FuYWRhIiwiYSI6ImNqd2dvZmUxdzE4ZWg0M2tkaXpuNG95aTQifQ.pBLM87fE3sIxRJqJT7Bf7g)
Quick
Avalanche
Snowpack
Weather
Incident
Information
- Avalanche date/time
- Saturday, November 24, 2018 at 12:17
- Number of avalanches in this report
- 1
- The size of avalanche
- 3
- Avalanche Character
- Loose dry
- Persistent slab
- Wind slab
- Trigger type
- Snowmobile
- Trigger subtype
- Accidental
- Start zone aspect
- NW
- Start zone elevation band
- Alpine
- Weak layer burial date
- Tuesday, November 20, 2018
- Weak layer crystal type
- Surface hoar and facets
- Wind exposure
- Lee slope
- Vegetation cover
- Open slope
Comments
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.