Sluff the magic dragon

In today’s tour at middle elevations in the Middle Fork, we easily triggered small sluffs but could not find any signs of slab instabilities.

• 2” to 3” of new snow overnight without any evidence of wind transport apart from a few small plumes near high summits.
• We traveled past numerous 6”-12” crowns that ran on Saturday, but could not produce any cracking or signs of instability in similar terrain features today.
• We skied steep slopes up to 45 degrees and triggered numerous sluffs in the top few inches of the snow. In sustained steep pitches, the sluffs entrained snow down to the 2/1 crust and grew to D1.5 in size. We managed these instabilities using sluff management techniques.
• We had good views of a lot of terrain and could not see any fresh slab avalanches. We observed a handful of D1 to D1.5 natural sluffs that ran today at mid and upper elevations.