Avalanche Forecast
Cariboos
Isolated wind slabs at higher elevations are the main concern right now. Remain vigilant around cornices, and minimize overhead exposure.
Avalanche Problem 1: Wind Slabs
What Elevation?
Which Slopes?
Chances of Avalanches?
Expected Size?
Travel and Terrain Advice
- Pay attention to cornices and give them a wide berth when traveling on or below ridges.
- Watch for wind loaded pockets near ridge crests and roll overs
- Use ridges or ribs to avoid pockets of wind loaded snow.
Avalanche Summary
Reports from the past four days of sunny weather included many wet loose avalanches to size 1.5. These occurred in steeper terrain on sunny aspects.
Snowpack Summary
The last snowfall was Thursday's storm, which brought 20-30 cm of new snow by Friday morning. Since then, isolated wind effect has created patchy wind slabs at higher elevations, but really, the main story has been the sun's effect on south and west facing slopes over the past several days. Daytime heating has resulted in moist or wet snow on sunny aspects, freezing to form a crust overnight.
Persistent weak layers from early January and mid-December are still being reported by local operators. They are generally considered dormant, but could wake up with a surface avalanche stepping down, a cornice fall, or a human trigger in a shallow or variable-depth snowpack area. These layers consist of sun crust, surface hoar and/or facets.
Weather Forecast
We're looking at small amounts of new snow and slightly warmer than normal temperatures throughout the forecast period. Scattered convective activity on Thursday and Friday could result in locally higher snowfall totals.
WEDNESDAY: Cloudy with wet flurries in the afternoon (2-6 cm). Light to moderate south west winds. Freezing level falling to 1700 metres late in the day, with alpine high temperatures of +2.
THURSDAY: Scattered flurries (2-5cm possible). Light northerly winds. Freezing level around 1600 metres with alpine high temperatures around 0 degrees.
FRIDAY: Scattered flurries (2-5cm possible). Light northerly winds. Freezing level 1300 metres with alpine high temperatures of 0 degrees.
Avalanche Forecasts in your Inbox
Avalanche Canada has switched to an RSS feed for its daily forecasts. This is a much more flexible method that allows automatic delivery to your email inbox, or to an RSS reader of your choice.
What are RSS feeds?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a popular standardized file format allowing up-to-date delivery of web-based content. RSS feeds enable you to receive content updates from websites, delivered to your email through an RSS aggregator (such as blogtrottr.com) or viewed through applications called RSS readers (such as feedly.com).
Set up an RSS feed for your email:
Select a RSS aggregator
- Cariboos URL:
http://www.avalanche.ca/api/forecasts/cariboos.rss - Copy the url and paste it into the appropriate field of your RSS aggregator.
- Fill in your email address.
- Voila! Watch the Avalanche Canada forecast roll into your inbox.
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Wind slabs formed on many aspects during last week's storm and may remain reactive. Extra caution is needed on solar aspects where sunshine could act as a natural trigger with a buried sun crust as a sliding layer.