Intense blowing and natural wind slab avalanches on Flower Ridge.

We went to Flower Ridge and the north end of the Mt. Judah summit today to look at wind loaded slopes and to be able to easily avoid avalanche terrain. We were able to find our first wind loaded test slope just a few feet from the parking lot and were quickly able to determine that cornices would collapse very easily today.

Moving up towards the ridgetop through sparsely treed terrain we were able to utilize numerous wind loaded test slopes to gather wind slab info. We found 4F+ hard wind slabs 8 to 12 inches thick sitting on top of F hard storm snow. Most of the time when we collapsed the corniced test slopes, the cornice chunks just entrained snow. In only a couple of instances did we propagate a wind slab failure on the test slopes.

As we came to Flower Ridge, blowing snow was intense. In the slight visibility breaks between max wind gusts we were able to see two natural wind slab avalanches with one foot crowns. The first one had happened prior to our arrival. The second occurred while we were on the ridgetop viewing the first. Both were triggered by natural cornice collapse.

We encountered one open creek at around 7,200' that still had an impressive amount of flowing water following the Dec 22 rain event.

Ridgetop travel was slightly difficult while travel in below treeline non-avalanche terrain was fairly easy due to the density of the new snow and only about 6 inches of ski penetration.