Southerly winds were transporting a lot of snow yesterday and continued through the night. Fresh slabs of wind drifted snow should be easy to trigger today as more snow falls and winds continue blowing from the south and southwest. What surprised me the most yesterday was how winds were reaching into many areas typically sheltered from the wind. There are few slopes untouched by winds. Today I would be looking for fresh wind drifts on most aspects and elevations and avoiding them.

There are two persistent weak layers to worry about. One is weak snow near the ground. This layer is most likely to produce an avalanche in places that have avalanched previously this winter (repeater paths). Drew and I unintentionally found one of these slopes yesterday when we were descending a ridge on Little Water Peak. The cornice broke and triggered a large avalanche at the ground. The only way to avoid this problem for now is to avoid riding avalanche terrain generally on the northern half of the compass including some upper elevation SE facing slopes.

While many slopes have a deeper and stronger snowpack, everything has its breaking point. I'm not sure if this snowfall has pushed slopes with a deep and strong snowpack to their breaking point or not yet, but I wouldn't want to find out. It's best to be a little patient.

The second layer is the the snow surface from Saturday that has a combination of small, near surface facets and surface hoar that are now buried 1-3 feet deep by the new snow. This layer will make slab avalanches involving the new snow and wind drifted snow easier to trigger and more sensitive. In many places this layer is easy to spot in snowpit wall as seen below. You can see all the layers in the new snow and the bottom stripe is the weak, faceted layer.

If you avoid wind drifted snow and stay off the aspects shown above for slopes that may have a buried persistent weak layer, then the avalanche problem to watch for is simply the new snow. It's always hard to know if it will fracture as a slab. The good new is that you can observe how the new snow is reacting on small test slopes. With snow continuing to fall today, I would expect the new snow to at least produce loose sluffs, but it may produce soft slabs about 1-2 feet deep.