Sled Ski Slides

Activity

Skiing

Terrain shape at trigger point

Planar

Snow depth at trigger point

Average

Terrain traps

• No obvious terrain trap

We toured up through dense trees before the terrain opened up into an old wildfire that left an area of sparse trees and alder. We carefully picked our way up using the terrain and tree cover, but we did have one shooting crack as we toured. Near the top of the small burn we saw a natural avalanche on surface hoar fail on an approximately 36-40° slope. We decided to turn back from the sparse trees and steep slopes above the burn and head back down to the dense forest using a mellower (30-33°) opening we had taken up. We talked about exit routes and safe regroups before we chose to ski the main open pitch back down to the dense trees cover one at a time. The first skier triggered a size 2 avalanche in their second turn that propagated out to their left and was ~60 m wide and ran 80-90 m. They managed to ski towards the edge before being knocked over and were left on the surface near the tail of the soft debris. The skier was ok with no injuries and only a missing ski pole.

Later we noted a size 1.5 skier remote as we left the meadows.