Crow with a view
Walking away unscathed.
Evan and I had an important educational & probably life saving experience on Sunday. After skinning 3 hours into Cutler Basin, Evan and I intended to skin up and ski the east slopes south of Willard Peak. We had made our way into the heart of the basin before it reaches serious avalanche terrain and were seeking a good slope to evaluate avalanche potential. The test slope was small, and it would run out onto a 10 degree slope. Evan went to conduct one avy pit near the bottom of the slope while I continued to skin about 20ft up and about 30ft to his left looking for a more substantially wind-loaded spot for a more effective test.
Boom! Oh shit! Move! Oh dammit, I have my skins on! Well, now I’m going for a ride… and it’s stopped. Hey Evan, take some pictures before I get up!
It was about a 5-6 second experience. You can probably see from the pics that the avalanche was small, roughly 30ftx30ft debris pile and the slide size was about 40ft high by 70ft across. It was 2ft at it’s thickest, and 6 inches at the top. Classic hard slab wind loaded avalanche. It broke into relatively large chunks, and generally felt like I was riding a slow moving earthquake. It’s a pretty heart pounding experience that was totally out of my control.
There’s a lot to learn here, so what are my takeaways?
- In future, when I have a great test slope, I’m going to do my best to ski cut it rather than skin directly onto it. Not always an option, but I was so helpless to react and move quickly on my skins I’d rather not be in that situation.
- I’m going to test & evaluate the snow before hopping out onto the test slope.
- This really changes my feelings on safety buffers & safe zones when skinning & skiing. Evan was not that close to me, which was intentional, but I’m not sure we’d been taking that as seriously as we should have been. 10 more feet and he would have been on the edge of the slide. In a 2 person team, having both of us caught in an avy is unacceptable. I’m going to be more deliberate about that in future.
- Terrain selection & understanding: If you examine the topo the area we were in was a large bowl/basin. It was a cloudy day and Evan and I were quite confused why all the aspects we were examining were crusted feeling. One of the problems was that the entire basin had been irradiated by the sun, so almost every aspect of the basin had been sunbaked & refrozen.
- Crusts have a dangerous stretch & sheer potential. I’m not sure that slope would have slid and been a hard slab had it not been so heavily sun affected, making the upper surface highly cohesive & slab forming. Normally I hadn’t thought that much of crusts because a baked & refrozen area is typically very solid & safe. This has shown me quite the opposite if layers underneath the crust have avalanche potential.
- Test slopes are great, and truly truly important in determining large scale effects. I will continue to seek out similar aspect & similarly loaded areas to determine if they are safe. We made our decisions correctly, with perhaps some minor tweaking desireable in the future.
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