Jim Steenburgh

Salt Lake » Little Cottonwood Canyon » Toledo Chutes

Toledo Chute

9,500'

Southeast

20°

Skier

Unintentionally Triggered

Dry Loose

New Snow

3"

30'

400'

Valuable lessons learned today in outlier conditions. My partner and I left Alta around 1 PM for a short tour for exercise and a quick snowpack eval. Graupel was falling, accumulating anywhere from 0 to perhaps 8 cm deep, with variations due to wind transport. A stout, 1 cm, rain crust existed above about 9200 feet that was extremely slick. We skinned up low-angle terrain beneath Toledo Bowl. At about 9500 feet (thumbnail F above), we decided not to go higher into steeper terrain and to return to Alta. As my partner descended the slope just to skiers left (east) of the pucker trees, a slough broke out on a slope that we measured later at 20 degrees. The slough continued down slope and I shouted to my partner who skied right into the pucker trees as the slough continued its slow march downslope, eventually descending into Toledo Gully. We continued slowly working our way downhill, encountering a solo skier who eventually skied ahead of us and encountered a debris pile where Toledo Gully crosses the jeep road and traditional skin track to Cardiff Pass. The solo skier told us he witnessed no other skiers in the vicinity, but he skied ahead of us and wisely did a beacon search where there was a debris pile at the skin/track jeep trail, finding no signals. We then caught up to him, had a quick discussion, and the solo skier went down perhaps 100 vertical feet further to the toe and did another search, again finding no signals. My partner and I repeated both searches just to be sure, then returned to Alta and reported the slide to UDOT. Photos below illustrate the remarkably low angle nature of the starting zone of this slide and how it ultimately descended into and down Toledo Gulch. My partner is near the toe of the slide in the final photo, with a debris pile more than deep enough to bury someone. A stout rain crust served as an extremely slick bed will likely be a problem tomorrow as well. Typical practice of keeping slope angles under 30 degrees may not be sufficient in areas where this graupel on rain crust exists.