Keep this one on your avalanche radar for the type of slide you could trigger. Early this week, Andy and Trevor remoted this beefy pocket on a steep, rocky, north facing (polar) slope in the wind zone, just under Murdock Peak. This terrain is easily accessed by the still open Mirror Lake Highway. Yup, you can step out of your car at Bald Mountain Pass and immediately walk into avalanche terrain. More on the slide HERE.

Here's the windup... mid and upper elevation slopes facing the north half of the compass harbor early season snow that grew weak and sugary during the November dryspell. Now that shaky foundation is buried 1-3 feet beneath last weekend's storm. Here's the unsurprising pitch... that's exactly where our problem child, persistent slab avalanches, are found! Bullseye terrain is shady, upper-elevation, rocky slopes where once initiated, today's avalanches can break several feet deep and a couple hundred feet wide. This week, in addition to triggering avalanches remotely, our team of snowpros experienced multiple red flags, like cracking and loud, booming whoomphs. Remember, this is the kind of avalanche dragon we can provoke remotely or from a distance, meaning we don't have to be on a steep slope to trigger the slide.

Look, you don't have to be a snow scientist to take a deeper peak under the snowpack's hood and see what we're talking about. It's not a big dig and a quick shovel excavation reveals a strong, dense slab over weak, sugary snow. That combo creates a trap-door feeling when we're trenching our sled or ski track.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a wind drift reactive to our additional weight, but the Uinta's are a big place with lots of terrain features to channel wind. We can add a margin of safety and steer clear of the hazard by looking for and avoiding wind-textured snow and fat, rounded pillows of snow on the leeward side of ridges and around terrain features like chutes or gullies.