Eric and I made it up to Tony Grove today amongst the hoards of people. We enjoyed a great day of sunshine and nice mid-winter powder. The wind was whipping pretty good on the ridgelines today and we noticed quite a lot of snow being transported and deposited about. There was a fair amount of wind loading on east and southeast facing slopes. On our way in to ride, we snowmobiled past a southeast facing slope around 9000 feet that had avalanched overnight (we think). Looked like the wind had tipped the balance and overloaded the slope. The slab was fairly small, maybe 40 feet wide by a couple of hundred feet vert and fairly shallow.

I dug a pit and on a northeast slope around 9100 feet. Compression tests were failing at 14 taps on the interface of old and new snow from the last storm….about 10” down. ECT also failed on the same weak interface, around 20 taps but did not propagate (ECTX). We felt fairly confident in the rest of the snowpack but were mildly concerned with the wind loading along the ridge lines. The lower angled slopes we rode were very stable, even on the steeper ridge lines where the wind had dumped a lot of excess weight.

On the way out, we noticed a couple of small wet slides on steep, south facing aspects, but nothing else seemed to be moving…. even with the heavy snowmobile traffic testing out some bigger lines.