[MCR] Rockies, Healy Pass area, Storm Mountain Fire Break

Subject: [MCR] Rockies, Healy Pass area, Storm Mountain Fire Break
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:31:40 -0600
I guided a ski ascent of a small peak about 1 kilometre east of Healy Pass on 
March 12th. A size 2 slab avalanche had slid out of the looker's left hand 
shoulder of the second slide path. The crown looked to be as deep as one metre 
and about 40 metres wide. I suspect that it was a fresh wind slab. The debris 
ran to the lower part of the track, but not into the runout zone. The slide did 
not trigger any deeper layers. We restricted our travel to low angle terrain.

Yesterday, March 13th, I instructed my AST 2 class in the Storm Mountain Fire 
Break in Kootenay Park. Only a couple centimetres of new snow in the Stanley 
Valley parking lot when we got there. We set an ascending track from the 
parking lot to the top of the fire break. Once we had 7 people standing in one 
spot there we got a large whompfing settlement on what I guessed was the basal 
facetes. Some of the fracture line was visible to us 10 metres up slope, 
thankfully the slope is only about 15 degrees there (not avalanche terrain). We 
got several easy compression test results there on the Valentines surface hoar 
layer down 60 centimetres (snowpack depth was 160 cms -the top half bounded 
snow, the bottom faceted junk). These observations very much validated the 
day's hazard forecast of High in the alpine, High at treeline, and Considerable 
below treeline. We made a run down the fire break which has been seeing a lot 
of skier traffic and needs more snow to cover old tracks. While
  training in the bottom of the fire break we had about an hour of snowfall of 
3-4 cms/hour and when we got back to the parking lot there was about 8 cms of 
new snow lying on the ground there.

Happy trails,

Barry Blanchard
Mountain Guide
www.barryblanchard.ca
www.yamnuska.com




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