Forecast for the Skyline Area Mountains

Wednesday morning, January 31, 2018
The majority of the terrain along the Skyline has a LOW avalanche danger and you can travel around fairly easy without much worry of triggering an avalanche. There remains a "pockety" or "spotty" MODERATE avalanche danger on the upper elevation steep slopes that face west and especially north and east. This means human triggered avalanches are still possible on some of these slopes. Which slopes? Good question. It's hard to predict which ones with the current snowpack structure. It's best to avoid upper elevation steep west, north and east facing slopes if you don't want to take a ride.

Weather and Snow
Wind picked up on Tuesday and stirred things up. No doubt, some fresh drifts were formed although I would describe them as "pockety". Snow stability tests are showing a variety of results. Some are hard to get anything to fail. Some are easy and propagate clean shears. I was able to get one slope to collapse and crack while sidehilling. Most other slopes stayed in place. All of this points to only "spotty" chances of triggering an avalanche right now.
Persistent Weak Layer




Description
As time goes on, the snowpack along the Skyline is becoming more relaxed. You are not so likely to trigger avalanches as you were last week. This will be the case until we get another significant storm that adds more snow which means more weight on the buried weak layers. Check out the video from the UAC director Mark Staples.
Additional Information
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