Avalanche: Meadows

Observer Name
T Diegel
Observation Date
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Avalanche Date
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Region
Salt Lake » Big Cottonwood Canyon » Silver Fork » Meadows
Location Name or Route
Silver Fork - Meadows
Elevation
8,900'
Aspect
East
Slope Angle
40°
Trigger
Skier
Trigger: additional info
Remotely Triggered
Avalanche Type
Soft Slab
Avalanche Problem
New Snow
Weak Layer
New Snow
Depth
10"
Width
60'
Vertical
400'
Comments
An active and interesting day in the Meadow Chutes area. On our second climb we saw someone skiing down away from a slide on Ricardo's, and since we hadn't seen it on our first climb we assumed it was skier triggered, but we didn't actually see it go. Perhaps this may be reported by the skier, but in case not: Ricardo's is east facing with a little north and a little south (kinda convex), and the it propagated a bit around that small radius (see pic). It's hard to say if the sun had an effect; the sun was on it, but it was a chilly morning and this occurred probably in the 9am range so it seems hard to imagine that it was sun-effect. The slide was not big nor was the deposition, which was good; I was there the day Ricardo's got it's moniker (https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/news/ci_14289618) and saw the result, and clearly that line can go big. I have always avoided it due to its convex shape and I've seen it run many times when nothing else has avalanched.
We skied a few runs on lower-angled lines, and were interested to see by the time we wandered over that folks had nibbled at El Rollo, the steep line in mid-Meadows that is also a bit of a frequent flier and had an interesting small slide reported yesterday by Malone/Morgan that was adjacent (north) to El Rollo proper that may have had a bit of sun-effect. No one skied over the sweet spot, but someone came pretty close (see pic). This made us think that perhaps the more northerly aspects were somewhat stable, because the skiers had come close enough to possibly trigger El Rollo. Those folks had also carried on below El Rollo on the steeper lower terrain apparently successfully.
We skied the Football Field - probably the 6th-8th sets of tracks - and carried on fairly deeply into the quasi-gully below, and the first of our party slid off to the left - onto the southerly-facing slope which typically feels safer as a stop/skin spot, and remotely triggered a D1 avalanche nearby (see pic of two skiers and debris below). We ski here a lot and never go as far over as where that slide initiated because it rolls significantly steeper and is pretty thin, but we were still on an adjacent slope that is in the mid-30's. By this time (mid-afternoon) the SE facing rolls had gotten slightly gooey, but that particular steeper section rolls a bit more to the east and the debris was soft powder, so it didn't seem like a sun-effect event. It was very clear that very subtle differences in aspect, steepness, convexity/concavity (the adjacent gully that's typically skied and had been skied before we arrived is more "supported") made all the difference, and subtlety is indeed difficult to ascertain.
Coordinates