24-25

Toured up the ramp and north towards hourglass couloir right after heavy snowfall at Bridger. Observed presumably natural wind slab avalanche crown at top of Hourglass (picture). Broke roughly 200ft wide and rather shallow, did not manage to run fully into the apron. Also noted many other small natural avalanches almost all breaking right at the top of the ridge. Strong winds from west loading slopes. Followed some solo tracks down just skiers left of hourglass, noted some instability but no major propagation or slides while skiing. Storm slab not quite cohesive this evening, but could definitely see it getting pretty spooky tomorrow.

Skied south of Cooke today. Winds were strong with frequent gusts to extreme out of the S. 3cm of new between 1530 and 1700. No cr, co and the wind slab produced moderate, non-planar results in hand pits. Limited vis and no avalanches observed. 

This was a small remote trigger next to the skin track, about 20 feet wide by 10 feet long.  Photo: K Gordon

Remote trigger, SE facing slope, ~100' crown, ~3" depth.  Photo: M Gillies

While skiing at Lewis and Clark yesterday, I triggered a small wind slab (roughly 2ft rectangle) while traversing into the run with no propagation. While we skied the run, there was some pretty heavy sluffing. Much of the surface was wind-affected, with a dense top layer that broke through to a weaker, less dense layer. 

Had several large whumphs in windslabs at the top of bacon rind today. Interestingly they only started once a few inches of new snow had accumulated from the cold front. At the end of the day the windslabs are out there with enough load to make them pretty touchy.

No obvious signs of instability where there was no wind loading.

After skiing Bradley's Meadow, we skied north into Wolverine Bowl aiming to go up the backside of Texas Meadows. When we were in the large flat meadow to the north of Hourglass Chute we heard two avalanches come down from the ridge a few hundred yards north of Hourglass. Too low of vis to estimate size or see anything but the powder clouds come over the bottom cliffs.