The day before the avalanche, Horsehead was one of the only slopes in the Abajos with snow. Looking up at it from town during the warm week we had just had started to make it seem like maybe Horsehead could be in for us this year even if the window was really small. I jokingly told my partner that even if it’s just a little strip of snow next to the horse, I would ride it. It was starting to look like that from town as the strong March sun was evaporating snow on all aspects. I took the sled up to get a closer look and told my partner that I thought it was better than it looked from town and might actually be fun. My partner and I have had many successful avalanche free days in the last 3 years we have been riding together. We discussed our plan as we usually do over text. We discussed wet loose avalanches, boot penetration, and low snow cover. We also talked about the risk of this over night freeze we were about to get and possibly having slide-for-life conditions in the bowl. I read the outdated Abajo forecast on the UAC, which discussed wet loose, rollerballs, etc. I also read La Plata and the Moab area forecasts. They warned of lingering persistent slab problems on N-NE aspects. Those areas have a lot more snow than us and we can typically only apply their forecasts to our zone partially and need to do our own work to understand the state of the snowpack.

The day started at around 7:45am at the N Creek trailhead where we dropped the sled and rode up to our zone, with the spring temps timing felt important just having our first freeze in over a week of 65 degree temps in Monticello. We dropped the sled and began our ascent up the east ridge of Horsehead peak. The Abajos currently have no snow on most aspects and we only spent a few minutes skinning before switching to booting up the steep grassy slope. We reached the summit which was bare with rocks. Having not traveled on any snow at this point, we saw no obvious signs of instability.

We descended on foot down from the rocky peak and dug a quick pit where we performed a hand hardness test, CT and ECT. We found 70cm of snow a classic setup of strong over weak. We got really poor results from the stability tests: CT2 and ECTP9. We decided we were definitely not skiing down the “mane” of Horsehead and start to consider other options that we had discussed the day before. From observing the bowl on the way up and over the last week from town, we knew that grass was exposed and that the snowpack was very shallow. We had discussed the night before that we could stick close to the grass and that would provide a reasonable exit and lower risk due to extremely low snow. We chose to head further north in bowl to a slightly more eastern aspect to see what that snow pack looked like. Horsehead currently gets somewhere between 6-8 hours of sun these days and the eastern flanks of the bowl get the most sun.

When we arrived at the lowest angle location of the bowl, I dug down and found around 10” of snow on that aspect. With bushes and grass exposed and so little snow, we discussed the safety of riding this. From our discussion, we wrongly assumed that the area we had traversed to with low snow was not connected with the area we had just deemed closed to us. While typically riding shallower snow is known to be a trigger for avalanches, this snow was so low, that even if it did avalanche, it would not be consequential (so we thought). We returned to the summit of Horsehead we we had dropped our bags and boards and got ready for the descent in the zone we had identified.

I dropped in and made my first few turns around the bushes and grass, I shouted back to my partner that the snow was going to be soft enough to make some turns and continued my descent. After 4 or 5 turns, the entire and I mean the entire bowl shattered like a pane of tempered glass. One second I was turning, I blinked, and then I was in the biggest avalanche I had ever seen.The avalanche made no sound when it broke, it was completely silent to myself and my partner. My first thought was to ride out of the avalanche, I looked left and right and for hundreds of feet in both directions was an avalanche. I remembered that this is the very moment I have been carrying around this extremely heavy battery powered airbag pack all these years and I pulled the airbag and it deployed without issue. I was on a snowboard on my heal side and I kept trying to dig into the lump grass that covers horsehead bowl. I slowed to a stop, and watched the rest of the bowl continue to slide down into the gully at the base of the bowl. I was carried for 15-20 seconds and according to my watch 300 vertical feet reaching a max speed of 12MPH. As soon as I stopped moving I called my wife and let her know that I was unharmed and alive knowing that she was likely watching us ride the bowl from town and had just seen the avalanche.

With a lot of hang fire above, I shouted to my partner not to descend. I boot packed back up to the crown where it had broken above me and was level with my partner. We discussed options and decided that it would be possible for me to get back to him, and we could descend the same grassy slope we came up. I went to the lowest angle section of the crown and stepped back onto the slab and traversed to my partner. The entire crown was about 30cm maybe reaching a max depth of 40cm in the deepest part in the southern most aspect of the bowl.

I was extremely lucky today - extremely lucky might not even cover how lucky I was. Some things that were in my favor, when the avalanche broke, it only broke a few feet directly above me. In other zones it broke well above where I was riding. The snow was shallow and the avalanche was slow moving where I was. It eventually passed me and left me sitting on the grass. I somehow managed not to hit a tree, despite aiming for one I managed to go around it to the right and stop before hitting the group of trees in front of me.

Well that’s the story, but what happened? How did two experienced backcountry travelers with over 25 years of combined experience (my partner more than me) make the decision to ride the slope even after getting such poor results from the pit. Neither of us were laser focused on the bowl and we knew other ways we could descend that we had previously taken on other tours. When you are up on that bowl near the summit, its hard to imagine an avalanche of this size. Knowing that the bowl does avalanche, but not being able to fathom something this large in such low snow. We have used terrain to limit exposure in the past and believed that was what we were doing today. When we dialed back our objective from center punching to going tree to tree and taking it easy, we had dialed back our plan, but not far enough. We had measured the entrance of our run at 28 degrees, but didn’t reconsider the 35 degree slope that ended up avalanching. We had needed to dial all the way back to avoiding avalanche terrain instead of dialing back on aspect and exposure. My partner and I discussed at length what went wrong today and it would be hard to make this mistake again. A poor pit result trumps all for us.

Forecaster note: The UAC does not have the resources to provide daily updated forecasts for the Abajo Mountains but instead provides updated snowpack summaries when conditions warrant. See the summary for that week here. We are extremely glad to hear that this incident had a positive outcome and would like to thank the party for their thoughtful and thorough account.