Today I attempted to climb up Eagle Pass Mountain on skis with a friend, but turned around due to touchy avalanche conditions. Instead we did some skiing in the lower alpine and just below treeline.

We observed a recent (past few hours) size 2 storm slab avalanche on a West aspect at 2150m, roughly 50-70cm deep x 70m wide, which ran on a prominent crust. This was consistent with moderate sudden planar results we had in a pit at 1900m on a WSW aspect. This crust was at least 20cm thick at our pit, and was easily probed everywhere we skied above about 1800m elevation. Above the crust, it was relatively low density moist storm snow (4F and F) at 1900m. There was a total of 142cm snow at our pit location.

We managed to drive to the parking lot for the summer trail, arriving with 20cm of wet snow on the ground. We were able to skin right from the parking lot, but decided to take our skis/snowboard off and walk the last little bit on the way down before we hurt ourselves.

Pretty great skiing for this time of year in moist pow.