Avalanche: Park City Ridgeline

Brett P

Salt Lake » Park City Ridgeline

Park City Ridgeline Monitors

10,000'

North

Skier

Remotely Triggered

Soft Slab

Wind Drifted Snow

Facets

17"

100'

Route: Willow/Hourglass Trail to Park City Ridgeline. Today's tour involved significant wind and tricky conditions. 3 to 17 inches of snow observed. Above 9,000', winds were blowing strong by 11:00 AM. Below 8,300', the snow is exceptionally wet; I highly recommend a scraper and skin wax to prevent soaking your skins before the climbing begins. We focused on the North slope of West Monitor, where we successfully triggered a 17-inch deep wind pocket via a 100-foot remote trigger on the ridge maybe 100 feet wide. The slab ran a fair distance down the fall line. "Not in Kansas anymore" sums it up—the "Weakest Snow on Earth" is officially a problem. On these North aspects, we found 17-inch deep wind loads that are well-connected due to the wet, windy conditions and a bit upside down. Ski Quality: Sub-par. We stuck to lower-angle slopes on similar aspects with less wind where things behaved as expected, but we were mostly still bouncing off "coral reef" and old tracks. We moved to South Monitor, where we intentionally and again remotely triggered another 17-inch pocket maybe 100 feet wide and 150 feet out in front of us on the ridgeline of the bowl. This one had more mass and ran to the bottom gully runout. Interestingly, the failure seemed to occur about two inches above the old crust/track layer within the new snow; it lacked high energy and seemed to move more via gravity than a clean shear. Tried for a decent video, but the conditions had other plans. Photo 1. SM avalanche Photo 2. 3 inches new snow Photo 3. 17 inches wind blown snow Photo 4. Sustained wind into WM Video if attached. Wind into WM and avalanche in SM.