Skiing around the last few days has been interesting. On Friday, a warm, wet and windy storm moved in and dropped about 15 cm of dense snow. This was followed by steady snow at S2 to S3 on Saturday with further moderate winds. When we were touring Saturday, trail-breaking was heavy, hand shears at the storm snow interface (about 25 to 30 cm down) were easy, and we could cut off storms slabs on any slope over about 34 degrees with ease. There was also lots of evidence of a natural avalanche cycle running at the storm snow interface on all aspects and elevations.
As frequently happens, Sunday brought rapid settlement of the storm snow and a fall-off in natural avalanche activity. But, there were some large (to size 3) remotely triggered slab avalanches on both Saturday and Sunday that involved step-downs to deeper snowpack layers. Stability was improving, but it was not a day to get onto anything steep.
Yet, that is what a bunch of people did. I saw up-tracks heading up 40 degree lee slopes covered with terrain traps. I saw people digging weird snowpits in locations that were not representative of where they would trigger an avalanche and then extrapolating the findings from very sheltered, low elevation, disturbed locations to high elevation, lee aspects on steep terrain. The same people were testing soft surface layers of snow with compression tests instead of using either a shovel tilt test or a burp test, thus further detracting from the veracity of their results. And, based on all kinds of irrelevant observations, people were skiing big steep slopes with big consequences, while apparently ignoring the biggest in your face indicator of poor stability/high avalanche hazard - recent natural avalanche activity.
Remember, if you see recent natural avalanches, you don't need to dig a snowpit to know that snow stability is poor, avalanche hazard is high, and you have a good chance of being killed or injured if you push out into big slopes with big consequences.
Do you really need to dig a snowpit?
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