My partner and I were out for a morning ski before work and decided to hike up to the Park City ridgeline to check out the effects of the recent high winds and changing temperatures of the last few days, hoping that maybe there would have been some activity to check out. We got up to the top of SM around 9 AM and didn't see any tracks or slide activity so we continued up to WM. We had blue skies and winds of around 25 MPH with a lot of fresh graupally snow being transported into deposit zones. Once on West Monitor, we decided to check out the stability of the cornice and the stability of the wind slab that had clearly formed. We had no intention of skiing it, we were just curious. On a safer zone of the cornice, my partner walked out to about 6 feet from the edge, where he kicked and I held his pole. We weren't going to get any closer than what we thought was a pretty safe distance (6 feet and not appearing to overhang). After two or three kicks, the section of cornice three feet ahead of him caved away, triggering the whole bowl directly underneath the cornice. We had time to get to the edge and watch as it pulled away the slope below as well as propagate South under a shelf that was down 50 feet or so from the initial crown. The debris field and cloud were huge and continued well into the flats below.

We weren't sure exactly how to access the crown to do an analysis since there was a lot of hangfire left that also seemed relatively unstable, but I carefully poked down underneath it just to get another perspective of the slide and hopefully identify the weak layers as well as get some measurements on the depth and snowpack. I didn't feel totally safe in the position that I was in and a large chunk of cornice still hung half-broken and precariously perched above the path. I measured the depth in that spot, 135cm (one pole) but it wasn't a fair representation of the whole slope which I would say averaged closer to 30-45cm. The slide's bed surface was also very hard - so hard I struggled to get my edge in. That was really all I felt comfortable looking at before wanting to get out from under the cornice and remaining slab.