Every aspect with the exception of West was rapidly wind loading today. This storm slab was sitting on top of a dense hard buried anywhere from 8” to 2’ down, with all of this resting of bottomless loose facets.
Amazingly active day while climbing on Reid’s Peak today. Shortly after experiencing significant shooting cracks through the storm slab, our party triggered a small slide roughly 50’ wide, 9” deep running 70’.
Later in the day we noticed far below us that a large natural slab avalanche ripped out below the Bald-Reid col. This one took out out the 2’ thick storm slab and broke at least 500’ wide and ran roughly 500’ producing two large debris piles.
Finally, just as we were heading home we heard the BOOM of a massive pour-over avalanche barreling down the East face of Reid’s Peak. We didn’t get a look at the starting zone but the wall of snow we witnessed pouring over the cliffs, at least 200’ wide, was terrifying and definitely would have destroyed/killed anything in its path. For our party, today was at the outer edge of acceptable risk. I cannot stress enough that riders should steer far clear of steep slopes above 10,000’ on all aspects other than West. This snowpack is highly sensitive and with winds cranking above 35mph the situation is getting rapidly more dangerous. Slopes were very sensitive to our weight and the natural avalanches we witnessed were large, destructive and in at least one case, clearly unsurvivable.
