Eric and Amy Flygare

Logan » Logan River » Tony Grove

Tony Grove

We rode up to Tony Grove to check out the conditions today. We were a little surprised that there was not as much avalanche activity as we had expected. We didn’t make it into Cornice Ridge or Castle rock but we saw quite a few other big slopes around Tony Grove and there was only one smaller avalanche right at the lake. The avalanche at the lake was fresh this morning and about 100 feet wide and ran 1-200 vertical feet. There were other small avalanches around the lake involving the new snow and graupel from today.

We dug pits on ENE and NE slopes at around 8600 feet. There is a solid 4-5 foot slab from the last week of storms. The problems lie just under the 4-5 foot slab. We got several failures during the compression test down around 12 inches and at 10 taps. The entire column failed above the January rain crust 50 inches down at 10 – 14 taps. The extended column test had an energetic failure at 10 taps (ECTP10). It came out with enough energy to take my feet out from under me. Below is a picture of the ECT column after it took me out.

The wind was blowing fairly hard along the ridges and the new snow drifted on the leeward side of the ridges. We were able to get a few small wind slabs to break loose on steep (38 degree) test slopes.

We snowboarded on mellow slopes facing south to northeast and found pretty good shallow powder conditions with no rain crust above 8000. There was 5-6 inches of new light snow when we left at 1:30. The conditions we found on the way out varied substantially as we descended. Above 8000 feet the snow was medium density with 5-6 inches of lighter snow on top, no crusts were evident. The boarding and snowmobiling was pretty fun. Below 8000 feet the snow started to get heavy and saturated. At 7500 feet there was a 1 inch thick rain crust covered by a couple inches of new wet snow. At 7000 feet there was about a 4 inch rain crust with an inch of slop on top. It was raining heavily below 7000 feet.

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