Moderate to strong southwest winds have been blowing for several days. Observers noted wind transport along high ridgelines in the Central Wasatch yesterday, even with warmer temperatures and rain in some areas.

These winds have been effective at building drifts of snow adjacent to ridgelines, as well as on wind-exposed mid-slope features such as gullies, rolls, and rock bands. Be on the lookout for a change in density of the snow you're traveling through: if the surface snow is suddenly deeper or stiffer, you've likely found a wind-loaded area. This will be most common on upper W-N-SE aspects, but wind-exposed mid-elevation terrain isn't out of the question.

Wind-drifted snow avalanches will be effective triggers for releasing a deeper, larger avalanche on our persistent weak layer (see below).

Two distinct weak layers of snow exist. The first is old October/November snow near the ground. The second is a layer of facets found 2–6 inches below the snow surface, sitting beneath a crust (see video). In select areas, different, specific layers of weak snow can be identified, but the structure is the same: strong, over weak.

The snowpack has handled the modest load of 2-6 inches of snow (0.3-1.43 inches of H2O) since the 17th, with very few avalanches running. Still, the structure persists. The remote-triggered avalanche on Murdock yesterday reminds us that a quiet snowpack isn't always a stable one. While you'd have to head to specific, high, northerly, wind-loaded terrain find these, it's important to give this problem a decent margin in your travels. Trent and I traveled conservatively Saturday, as Nikki and I did yesterday—keeping in mind that we likely wouldn't get any warning signs before an avalanche 1-2 feet deep could be on the menu.

Jenna Malone and Allison Conover found full propagation yesterday in upper Little Cottonwood Canyon.