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Avalanche: Rock Bowl

Observation Date
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Avalanche Date
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Region
Logan » Logan River » Tony Grove » Rock Bowl
Location Name or Route
Rocky Bowl
Elevation
9,100'
Aspect
East
Slope Angle
35°
Trigger
Snowboarder
Trigger: additional info
Unintentionally Triggered
Avalanche Type
Soft Slab
Avalanche Problem
New Snow
Weak Layer
New Snow/Old Snow Interface
Depth
15"
Width
70'
Vertical
400'
Comments
We rode in the Tony Grove area today. We found very sensitive conditions on east facing slopes. The snow has not bonded well to the underlying crust from last week. While riding Rocky bowl, we kicked of a medium sized slab about 70 feet wide and 15 inches deep (Picture 1 and 2). I was able to get out to a safe zone and watch as the avalanche ran to a bench about 400 feet below. We move to a slightly mellower angled slope to the south, which was also east facing, and had a crack propagate about 100 feet and opened up a 2 inch wide crack but did not slide. We kicked off a few smaller slab avalanches that only involved the top 4-6 inches of snow (lower avalanche on the 2nd picture, and also in the third picture). We also noticed several shallow slab avalanches on the East face of Mt Magog (Picture 4).
Other slopes seemed to be bonding much better. There was significant sluffing in the north facing Miller bowl but no slab releases (Picture 5). We also rode some steep North facing slopes with nothing more than some minor sluffing.