This area is out of our forecast zone.
Avalanche: Hatcher Pass
Location: Moose Creek
We spent two days in the mountains to the East of Hatcher Pass. Lower elevations have a solid supportable crust over a deep base of loose facets, makes for easy traveling until your snowmachine breaks through the crust and gets swallowed. Fast skinning conditions though.
High elevation north aspects hold mostly cold snow, but the mid-March warmup crust is there in many places, providing a bed surface for the recent new snow to slide on.
There was 5-10″ snow up high later this week, and it’s all sitting there available for wind transport whenever the next wind storm moves in.
Forecaster Comments
| Trigger | Natural | Remote Trigger | Unknown |
| Avalanche Type | Dry Loose Snow | Aspect | North |
| Elevation | unknown | Slope Angle | unknown |
| Crown Depth | unknown | Width | unknown |
| Vertical Run | unknown |
Avalanche Details
attached picture is an example of the many dry-loose avalanches that happened between Thursday the 6th and Friday the 7th. This slide ran almost 700 vertical feet and was 30-50ft wide.
Most of the slides we saw were only a few inches deep near the top, but where couloirs constricted the debris piles could be thigh high.
Even though these were definitely loose cold snow slides, the debris set up surprisingly firm and made skiing in the avy runouts not good.
Anything that hadn't slid would definitely sluff off with a skier. Sluffs were not running very fast, thankfully.
Obvious signs of instability
| Recent Avalanches? | Yes |
| Collapsing (Whumphing)? | No |
| Cracking (Shooting cracks)? | No |
Observer Comments
many dry-loose avalanches on north aspects. Benign where they could spread out on an apron. Enough to injure a person, but not bury, where the slides ran within constricted couloirs.
almost 700 vertical foot run from a small start zone on a not-super-steep slope. We were surprised that the snow melted enough in this thin-dry slide for it to refreeze very hard.