Avalanche: Girdwood

On our approach we picked a chute into an east facing bowl. Our plan was to ski one at a time through the chute and regroup in a safe area skiers right below a rock band and continue descending one at a time back to the skin track from there. Skier 1 skied down through the chute with no problems and got to the safe area and called up for the next skier. Skier 2 started to descend down the left side about 50 feet, hit a rock under the snow and started to fall. As they were falling a wind slab about 30 feet wide broke and started carrying them and one of their skis came off. After being carried 30-40 feet they were able to stop themselves on the left edge of the slide path. More wind slab on the skiers left of the chute broke off as the debris moved downhill. Once the debris had passed they traversed skiers right across the bed surface and regrouped with skier 1. Skier 3 descended the bed surface which was a mix of old wind slab and facets and regrouped with skier 1 and skier 2. We saw the ski in the bottom of the bowl and descended one at a time to the right of the debris path where the angle seemed more mellow. After locating the ski, we skied out of the bowl and back to the trailhead. We guessed it ran about 700-800 feet before stopping.

We read the avalanche report and saw wind slab was going to be our main concern for the day. During our ascent we noticed wind texture in the lower meadows but it didn't feel like a slab. Up higher on the ridge it didn't look like the wind had done as much damage to the area we wanted to ski as other mountains we could see during our climb. After chatting about it we decided we were all comfortable with heading up there to ski. The first 50 feet of the chute didn't feel like it was a slab, but wind slabs had formed in the narrow terrain. We're all happy no one got hurt and we're taking notes on the lessons learned.