Avalanche: Monte Cristo

I would like to draw attention to this portion of this morning's avalanche report. "The wind-drifted snow has created soft and sensitive cornices on the ridgelines and these cornices may break further back than you expect and trigger soft slab avalanches below them."

Today traveling in a party of two my partner and I planned to ski "Heart of Darkness." Starting from Alta and skiing into Big Cottonwood. The wind was gusting into the 30s on the Cardiff ridge line around 8am. By the time we were breaking trail above little superior the winds had died down a bit, but resumed gusting from the North at the top of superior around 10am. Visibility wasn't great but we could see multiple large looming south facing cornices on the ridge line between the top of superior and monte cristo. Observing them and their size we communicated a plan to take a large birth around them to the north. At the bottom of the saddle as I was breaking trail when my left foot gave way and an enormous cornice the length of at least 2.5 bus lengths and quite thick broke away to the south and down toward the directisimo gully. I still had my right foot and heaved my body back away from the lip. We descended the north face to a place we felt comfortable away from the break line and any more snow that could break away. We called Alta Central to report the trigger and let them know that we were the only party on the ridge and we were safe.

Shaken up we decided to change our tack and ski out Mineral Fork. I would like to recognize that I was humbled by the mountains today and feel extremely lucky not to have ended up in a much worse situation. Even knowing that cornices must be a wider birth than one may assume we didn't give enough room. The wind loading under the cornices had created a false sense of where the ridge existed and the cornice pulled out much more snow than simply what was observed overhanging.

The first picture is the only one we captured after it broke, we were more focused on stepping away. Along the same vein we didn't peer over the edge to see if it had triggered a avalanche, but from Hwy 210 later in the day once skies had cleared we could see debris (we do not believe from an avalanche, only the cornice fall).

The second picture was taken before we triggered the cornice and I drew (I am no artist) an approximation of the location where we were standing when it broke.