I was working a Pro Level II class today and this is a photo of the worksheet produced jointly by all the instructors at the end of our field day. What more could you ask for? My general feeling is that we just got walloped with a huge storm with lots of water weight. It seems like most of the avalanche activity was in heavily wind loaded, steep slopes near ridges and some deep releases in repeater slide paths. In the other terrain, the same weak layers are still present but most of our snowpit tests had a mix of no propagation or propagation with relatively strong force. I would definitely continue to avoid steep slopes especially ones with lots of wind deposits during the storm. For instance, we skied out to No Name Bowl and No No Name Bowl to take a look at them. They had not slid and they did not seem to have much wind drifted snow but there was no way any of us wanted to mess with it. Same with all the other unslid slopes along the Park City ridgeline. As Drew Hardesty says, "Persistent weak layers require equally persistent patience."
Of course, we had to take a look at the huge avalanche in South Monitor. See Mark White's excellent observation and photos from today.
