Let's face it... our snowpack is a bit of a gong show. No, it's not a top to bottom sugary mess, rather there's some layering and structure and that makes it even more deceiving. But if we take a look under the hood, we find weak, sugary snow or what we call persistent weak layers, buried in between stronger layers of snow. Think of it as an upside-down cake. And anything "persistent" in the snowpack takes a long time to heal. So, we've got some junk in the trunk and it's not going away any time soon. Even without a big storm, there's an eerie feel to the snowpack. For nearly two weeks now, every slope my colleagues and I walk on respond with big, booming collapses, and cracks shooting everywhere, suggesting we've got a dangerous setup in our snowpack. And while recent avalanche activity has abated somewhat, we know this type of snow structure leads to tricky avalanche conditions, because once it starts storming again, the weak sugary snow that's now buried in the mid portion of our snowpack comes back to life. This is the type of setup where our snowpack needs a trigger like us to roll along and knock the legs out from underneath. And yes, we can trigger slides from a distance or from adjacent slopes, and this is the kind of avalanche dragon where we pull the entire log pile down on top of us, even if we're playing on low angle terrain. But you don't have to ride blind... so, tweak small test slopes, looking for and listening to signs of unstable snow like whoomping sounds and sudden collapses of the snowpack or shooting cracks in front of your skis, board, or sled. And of course the biggest clue of all... recent avalanches, especially on the same types of slopes you wanna ride on.

Yesterday's winds found enough loose snow to blow around and whipped up a fresh batch of drifts that'll react to our additional weight. The vast majority of today's drifts are found on the leeward side of upper elevation ridges, but we know the Uinta's are a big place, so you'll want to be on the look out for terrain driven drifts in terrain features like chutes or gully walls. In either case, it's an easy and mostly manageable avalanche problem to avoid by simply steering clear of any fat, rounded piece of snow, particularly if it sounds hollow like a drum. And remember... our snowpack is super shallow and triggering even a small slide can take you for a body-bruising ride through rocks and stumps barely hidden under the thin snowpack.