Triggered by skiers on the lower rollover. They were able to ski off to the side. This is most likely the same location as a full burial from January of 2003 (Repeater).

Advisory from February 6, 2003

Avalanche Conditions:

With hoards of powder-hungry people out yesterday testing lots of different slopes, it’s not too surprising that three different people found slopes that erupted into action. One skier tickled an east-facing, shallow, rocky area in Toledo Chute above the town of Alta, which broke a couple feet deep and 20 feet wide. They were able to ski out of it. Another skier put a ski cut into the top of West Monitor on the Park City ridgeline and triggered a slide a couple feet deep and 50 feet wide on an east-facing slope. Finally a party of skiers in Cardiac Bowl triggered the lower section of the exact same slope which buried a skier 4 feet deep back on January 6th. This was 1-2 feet deep and about 80 feet wide and northeast-facing. I have more details on all of the recent activity on our other recording at 364-1591 and you can check the web at www.avalanche.org and click on Salt Lake and on Advisories for photos, fracture line profiles and a list of the details of these avalanches.

All of these slides were in thin snowpack areas and they broke within the old faceted snow beneath the chocolate brown crust formed from last week’s warm temperatures, wind and dust. Yesterday we also looked at several other recent avalanches in the same areas, which all fit this same description. I think that total snow depth is an important key in most, of these avalanches. Remember that thin snow means weak snow and when we drape a fairly uniform blanket of new snow over the mountains, it’s the thin snowpack areas that get cranky. You find thin snowpacks mostly in places which have already avalanched in the past month or two, near wind-blown ridges or steep, rocky areas. Now that everything is buried, you need x-ray vision to know which is which, so it seems like a bit of a crap shoot. In these conditions, one handy trick I practice like a nervous tick: I turn my ski pole upside down and push the handle end into the snowpack about a hundred times per day to test the depth of the snow. If I can hit the ground with my pole, or if I can feel some nasty hollow layers below I dig down to see what kind of monkey business is going on. Although most slopes are staying in place quite well, there are enough booby traps out there to make things tricky and scary, so this is not the time to get too bold. Although there’s only localized places where you can trigger an avalanche, most of these avalanches are hard slabs breaking two or more feet deep and involving a lot of snow.