Aided by clear skies and light winds, the strong March sun will quickly go to work today and heat east, south, and west aspects, including shaded or northerly aspects below about 8000'. Although I am expecting most activity to be wet loose (such as Mark White's photo below from yesterday in Cardiff Fork in the Salt Lake mountains), I also think cohesive slabs of damp/wet snow are possible, where these wet slabs could break out more widely and run on sun crusts that formed on Saturday. I do think the generally minor wet activity the past few days has slowly allowed the snowpack to adjust to warming, but today will be a more significant warm-up and I am expecting much more widespread wet activity - including larger avalanches - than the past two days. Move off of and out from underneath any steep slope once you see any sign of warming - such as rollerballs, natural wet sluffs, and unsupportable snow.

Cornices - Avoid traveling across or underneath corniced ridgelines as today's warming may make cornices reactive. (Bombard photo)

In 2016, Drew Hardesty presented on an analysis of Utah avalanche fatalities (link) at the ISSW workshop in Breckenridge, CO which mentions 5% of Utah avalanche fatalities involve cornice falls.

I suspect many avalanches stepped down into older weaker layers leftover from previous avalanche events from January and March. These may have been many feet deep and hundreds of feet wide and most likely on northwest to northeast to southeast facing slopes at the mid and upper elevations. As one can see from the photos, these avalanches have - and can still - run quite far even into assumed safe terrain. The Provo snowpack remains dangerous on many aspects and elevations, and today's increasing temperatures may make conditions even more sensitive. Even very experienced people are giving a wide buffer of margin in this terrain. These are difficult and dangerous conditions to assess - from Cascade to Box Elder to Timp to the southern Wasatch Back (Snake Creek to Mill Canyon Peak).

There was enough avalanche activity on Monday in the Salt Lake mountains involving recent storm snow that warrants our continued attention on those mid and upper elevation northerly aspects where you will also find the best riding conditions. This includes sluffing in steep terrain (photo below), and pockets of denser storm snow or wind drifts in the higher terrain in the alpine (Trent has an excellent observation from Hogum Fork just to the north describing this). Yesterday I was finding recent instabilities within the top 2’ of snow to have largely settled out, but I would watch for areas where graupel has possibly pooled, such as below steeper cliff bands. This is pretty easy to evaluate with quick hand pits or pulling out your shovel - looking for the structure of a stronger slab over weaker snow (such as a denser slab on top of a layer of loose graupel.)