Turnagain Pass

The glide activity continued yesterday, with a fresh release on the south side of Eddie’s ridge caught on the DOT webcam at Turnagain Pass sometime Friday night or early Saturday morning.

Yesterday’s glide avalanche on the south side of Eddie’s was the latest in a flurry of glide activity in busy areas. Photo from the Turnagain Pass RWIS webcam, 01.13.2024

Glide avalanches remain our main concern today, as the active glide cycle we’ve been tracking continues. Yesterday’s glide avalanche on the south side of Eddie’s was the latest in a string of glide avalanches that have been happening in busy areas. This includes glide avalanches on the front side of Sunburst, widespread active glide cracks above the entire motorized uptrack on Seattle Ridge, the southwest face of Cornbiscuit, and PMS Bowl on the southwest side of Magnum ridge just to name a few. We’ve also seen ongoing activity in Girdwood and Summit, and are just starting to see glide avalanches down in Seward. We have a glide problem on our hands.

These avalanches are large and destructive, and they are impossible to predict for a single slope. While we see this type of avalanche almost every season, all of the recent activity in high-traffic areas is not normal. This type of avalanche is nothing to mess with. Consider using alternate routes if your normal skin track or uptrack travels under an open glide crack. These are often easy to identify from afar as a gaping brown crack where the snow has started peeling down the slope, exposing bare ground. In some cases these cracks may just be starting to open up or have been buried by a few inches of snow and will be harder to identify; those will look more like a wrinkled or cracked surface. If choosing a new route is not an option, you can reduce your exposure by traveling one at a time and moving quickly when you have to cross under a glide crack. Keep this in mind while you are moving as well as when you are picking safe spots to watch partners.

Open glide crack on Cornbiscuit that was difficult to identify while on the slope. Photo: Peter Wadsworth, 01.09.2024

Easterly winds picked up overnight, making a fresh round of wind slabs to watch out for today. The wind is expected to switch to the southwest and calm down today, so the challenge will be to look for and avoid steep terrain that was loaded by last night’s winds. The most problematic terrain will be steep upper-elevation slopes just below ridgelines, steep convex rollovers, and cross-loaded gullies. It shouldn’t take much time to gather some information about how reactive these wind slabs will be today. Take a second to hop off your snowmachine or step off the skintrack and see what the snow on the surface feels like. If you’re seeing a relatively stiffer layer of snow on the surface sitting on top of a relatively softer layer, look for more sheltered terrain. Small but steep test slopes can be a great way to see how reactive this most recent round of wind slabs are today. Any clear signs like shooting cracks or recent avalanches should be taken as a warning that conditions are especially dangerous. Keep in mind, you won’t always get this kind of clear feedback even when conditions are reactive. If you are planning on getting into steep terrain, it’s important to take the time to poke around and see how the snow on the surface is behaving.

We are still tracking the weak layer of near-surface facets and surface hoar that formed at the end of December and was buried right at the beginning of January. This layer produced some big avalanches during last weekend’s storm, as well as one human-triggered avalanche the day the storm finished. That avalanche was triggered remotely from a flat ridgetop above Main Bowl on the back side of Seattle Ridge. As far as we know this has been the only human-triggered avalanche on that layer, and we are thinking it is unlikely anyone else will be able to trigger an avalanche on it at this point. However, buried surface hoar layers like the one that produced that avalanche can remain reactive on isolated slopes so we are still gathering data on this layer before we drop it from the forecast entirely. Areas like Johnson Pass, Lynx Creek, or Silvertip Creek are a few zones where we have little or no snowpack data, and places where you might want to travel a bit more cautiously and be thorough with snowpack assessment before getting into steep terrain.