We rode in the Franklin Basin area today and found great riding conditions on north facing terrain. We found more wind affected snow today than we found yesterday near Mt. Elmer. We found sensitive wind slabs on some north slopes. The picture below shows one of five slabs that failed on us. This one failed when I was about 10 feet down from the crown, the slab was about 10 feet wide 60 feet top to bottom and 1 foot thick. The slide started in steep terrain over 40 degrees and quickly lost momentum once the slope angle mellowed out. None of the slides ran more than 150 vertical and were slow moving so they were easy to outrun but had the slide been in terrain with higher consequences they could have ended badly.

Most slopes other than strait north were getting affected by the sun. We noticed several wet slides occurring on east facing slopes around 1200. Hopefully the next series of small storms will cover up some of the bad layers…