Monday's strong southerly winds loaded north facing slopes. These are now old and probably hard to trigger. Winds backed off since Monday, but some loading is still occurring on NE slopes. I noticed small cornices forming on the ridge line above the Horse Creek Chutes. It is possible that the natural avalanches I observed today were triggered by wind loading. It is hard to say for sure since I observed them from a far distance. Winds were well behaved today and this problem should be trending down for now.

We've all known about our persistent slab problem for some time now. We haven't seen any avalanche activity because we haven't had much snowfall to put a heavy load on these weak layers. And skiers have been prudently avoiding avalanche terrain. Now we have three storms in a row and we start to get some natural activity. Looks like we've got enough weight now to overburden our buried weak layers. We experienced multiple collapses yesterday while traveling to the top of the North Woods. Today I traveled the opposite ridge line (west ridge of the North Woods) and experienced five large collapses.