Click photo for zoomed in view of crown area.
Well it sure scares me! I know, I know…the snowpack is healing as we speak…right? I’ve been getting all the emails, reading the forum threads, and talking to all the folks on the skin track. Everyone really seems to be getting a better feeling about this years snowpack. But with big slides like this one that ripped naturally on Buck Mountain last week and considering there probably wasn’t the dangerous rain crust at that high of an elevation, it will definitely keep me thinking about getting on some of the bigger faces for quite some time.
Imagine if you can, being on this slope when it ripped. The East Face of Buck Mountain is a very popular ski mountaineering objective, so it could have easily happened to someone. Do you think you could have survived? I wonder how this avalanche was triggered. Do you think it propagated from something coming off the cliffs above, or on it’s own from the increasing weight of the snowpack? Considering it has a guess-timated 10′ crown (I see two of them), the slide must have roared on it’s way down. Scary stuff!
Thanks for this, Steve! With Bridger Bowl’s new open boundaries policy, tons of stuff is getting skied willy-nilly, and I’m concerned that people with little or no avalanche education are getting out there with shiny new peeps and no idea how to use them. It rained up at Bridger this morning after 4″ of fresh, and then it started groppling, no idea what this is going to do with all the wind. Thanks for keeping it in the forefront!
Sounds pretty scary up there Kate. Things seem to be mellowing out around here avalanche danger-wise…but these big open faces will be scary for plenty of time to come…and maybe even more so in the spring if you sleep in too late.