Taking a retrospective look [1] [2] [3] at the coming (at the moment
of writing) season forecast.

Alas, much of it has transpired, except for one thing. Most, if not all
avalanche fatalities this season are people with tons of experience,
including one retired backcountry ski patroller with 40 years of
backcountry skiing in his resume, and recently, a Wildsnow blog
gear editor and a former ski patroller (a blog piece in his memory
is here). None of the victims were bored ski resort customers who
were pushed into the backcountry by some draconian COVID-related
ski resort policies, as many expected. None of them were pushed
further into a more rugged backcountry by droves of the said newbies
who would crowd the easily accessible and popular locations (in fact,
two of the accidents occurred in the sidecountry of the Colorado
ski resort, one of which essentially precisely in the same location
as another accident the year before). It is easy to engage in the
blame game although the background of these people does not provide
too much foundation of such a game. Never send to know for whom
the bell tolls but to once again realize that

There are no experts in the backcountry.

However, the hindsight is always 20/20 and the main reason behind
this writing following the daily reading of the CAIC accident reports
is to take whatever lesson this data can give to be better prepared
for one's future endeavors.

The high death toll in the mountains this season is perhaps not the
covid, for the reasons mentioned above but a rather catastrophic
snowpack conditions across the entire span of the Western part
of the country resulting from the massive cold wave in the early
November followed the by the period of cold dry weather. By the
early December the top of the thin fall snowpack was extremely
weak and not capable of forming good bonding with the upper layers
that were dumped in December and January.

It is this layer that caused the massive fatality wave in February.
Note that the November snowpack is only a foot deep. Many slides
across the country initiated at the higher (later) weak layers
and stepped down to it as they propagate, taking the entire
season snowpack. An unusual number of the D3 sized avalanches
have been reported this season for this reason. This weak layer
persisted over at least three months while gradually becoming
stronger, which is evident from the accident profiles, with
skiers being the majority among victims in the early season and
snowmobilers who exert a greater load on the snowpack, in the
later.

In the mid January I was looking for this layer in the Sonora
pass area, found it at over a meter depth but was unable to get
it to collapse in either ECT or CT tests. However, the region
where I did tests is lower in elevation and is located in maritime
climate zone where snow tends to be more wet and stabilizes more
readily than the snowpack in the continental parts of the US
like Utah and Colorado. Still, the most recent accident indicated
that this layer is still reactive, now about 4 months after it was
formed.

In one of their pieces Wildsnow coined a term "the Winter that
Shall Not Be Named", implying shitty, by the Colorado standards,
snow conditions. I think this season also deserves this title,
for the entirely different reasons (currently, it is two casualties
away from being the deadliest season on the record, and the season
is not over yet).

Stay safe

Current Music: Empyrium - Uber dem Sternen
Tags: avy, backcountry, chronicles

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