The images above illustrate a tale of two snowpacks.

The top image is a slide triggered Sunday with a good thump on an upper elevation, southerly facing slope which has remained shallow and weak this season. No es bueno.

The next image shows a deep, strong snowpack that's happy in its own skin.

So here's the deal- we've got a complicated snowpack structure, but without further investigation or an intimate history of the terrain, it'll all look white to us. The problem is, there's several persistent weaknesses buried deep in the pack and these are a concerning because anything "persistent" in the world of snow is slow to heal. While deep dangerous avalanches are becoming harder to trigger, recent avalanches breaking to the ground suggest all we need to do is find a shallow, weak portion of the snowpack, perhaps around a rock or bush that we can't see underneath the snow, collapse the slope (whoomph), and now we're staring down the barrel of a dangerous avalanche. This type of snow structure is particularly dangerous because we don't even have to be on a steep slope in order to trigger a slide... we just need to be connected to it. And here's the deceiving twist, the range is fat and white and the snowpack is gonna feel really strong and supportable. As a matter of fact, we can ride many slopes without incident and think we're good to go.

However, the key to a successful day of riding means avoiding bulls-eye terrain where unmanageable avalanche dragons live, and it's pretty straight-forward. The common theme for all the big avalanches we've seen recently have occurred on steep, upper elevation, wind drifted slopes facing the north half of the compass, along with slopes that avalanched earlier this season and have a shallow snowpack.