Turnagain Pass
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Welcome to the 2010-11 Winter! Daily avalanche advisories will start this Friday, November 12 2010. We have gotten a decent amount of snow this past week (23″ in the past 2 days in Turnagain Pass), and our avalanche eyeballs are now in full gear. Be aware that conditions are highly variable at this time of the year, and that weather conditions can change the stability of the snowpack quite rapidly. We look forward to anCNFAIC Staff great year, and encourage everybody to send us any avalanche observations by clicking on the tab at the top of this page. See you on Friday! JG & KW
Tuesday Nov. 9 Update
Kevin and I toured up Sunburst and found quite the early season snowpack. What a great start to the season! Snowpack depths ranged from 3 ft. at 1000′ elevation to 5 ft. at 2400′ to 7 ft. at 3100′. All fluff top to bottom. You can still catch a ski tip on the alders down low so be careful. We found no significant weak layers in 4 seperate snowpits and a nice rightside-up snowpack. On Manitoba down by Summit Lake, a few of our observers found some buried surface hoar under about 3 feet of soft storm snow around 3000 feet elevation on a west aspect. This layer produced clean fast Q1 shears and is certainly something to watch out for on CNFAIC Staff slopes in that area. We saw quite a few fresh glide crack avalanches, especially along Turnagain Arm. Below is a photo of two fairly recent glide avalanches on the east face of Pyramid (visible from the Seward Highway).
Make sure you don’t find yourself inadvertantly below one of these things and in the line of fire. They are unpredictable at best. The next storm on the horizon looks like a warm one, so expect conditions to change by this Thursday.
LP
