Africa Hot

Toured in the Lake McDonald area to assess the damage from the recent warmup.

• Wet loose avalanche activity from the past few days was widespread on sunny aspects. Mostly D1 to D2 involving just last weekend’s storm snow. However, there were a few slides on the south face of Stanton and SW face of Vaught that had gauged to the ground, producing larger debris.  One of these slides off of Vaught produced a very startling amount of debris that ran almost full track (D3.5)
• We spotted 4 large slab avalanches that recently failed on old snow layers on rocky, SW and W facing aspects at upper elevations, D2 to D3.
• We started exiting avalanche terrain around noon to 1 pm. We did not see any avalanche activity prior to that, but saw some rollerballs on high, NE aspects. The snow surface became increasingly saturated and unsupportive but less reactive to ski cuts as we descended. We were able to produce rollerballs and pinwheels that gained volume at mid and upper elevations. At low elevations, the rollerballs disintegrated into mush without collecting volume.