Yesterday I toured up Paola Ridge to help a friend look for his skis, after he lost them in an avalanche. I was not present for the avalanche, but am familiar with the area.
We toured from the gravel pit up Paola Ridge. On the open East facing burned face, there was evidence of two wet loose avalanches. These slides ran partial path with debris up to 3-4 ft deep, from previous days. As we continued up the East facing terrain of the ridge, we dug multiple hasty pits and found a stable snow pack.
Once we got to the North facing bowl, where the avalanche incident occurred, at 6,900ft we decided to safely travel the ridge to assess avalanche conditions. Within minutes of traveling on the ridge we heard whumpfing and observed shooting cracks. From a safe distance in the trees, I remotely triggered two avalanche that ran full path and propagated over 200ft+ along the ridge at a high rate if speed. Crown height was 6-28 inches, averaging 12 inches, and followed the ridge. Failure seemed to be on a buried surface hoar layer.
I felt the weak layers were highly reactive and propagated very fast. After seeing the conditions, we decided that it was unsafe to leave the ridge and travel on the North facing aspect, and that skis would not be recovered anytime soon. We egressed via the south facing slope to Dickey Creek. We stayed on 25-30 degree trees slopes. On the egress, we dug multiple hasty pits that did not show us signs of instability in the snow pack.
We did see that a natural slide went skiers left of the slide that [a rider] was in [2/1]. The natural slide seemed to connect with the previous slide path, and propagated hundreds of feet into the trees (far skiers left of the northeast facing bowl).
