Yesterday, my crew and I spent the entire day with our noses and hands in the snow and it's pretty clear... our current structure is a gong show. No, it's not a top to bottom sugary mess, rather there's some layering and structure, with a heat crust thrown in the middle of the pack just to keep us on our toes, and that makes it even more deceiving. Indeed, we've got a somewhat complex setup and we could get overwhelmed by over-analyzing... so let's keep it simple.

It's storming, the wind is blowing, we have a persistent weak layer in the mid portion of our snowpack, and our fragile pack is going through a rapid change. This is the setup where the wheels come off the bus.

And while recent avalanche activity has abated somewhat, we know this type of snow structure leads to tricky avalanche conditions, because the snowpack is waiting for a trigger like us to roll along, collapse the slope, and knock the legs out from under it. And yes, we can trigger slides from a distance or from adjacent slopes. As a matter of fact, 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.

Winds blew along the high peaks yesterday, but I found recent wind drifts, hard, stubborn, and unreactive. Today it's a different story because winds have fresh snow to work with. As today's storm evolves look for widespread drifting, not only along the leeward side of ridges, but also around terrain features like chutes and gullies. 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.