Wind Slabs and Cracking in the Munchkins Area

We skinned into the Munchkins area using low angle slopes and gained the N-S running ridgeline. On the way up we could feel the Jan 4 rain crust and soft snow around it in some places but not in others. We did not experience any whumpfing nor could we get test slopes in sheltered areas to show signs of instability. In general, the new snow was soft and did not exhibit slabby characteristics. Our snowpit data was consistent with these observations.

As we moved higher on the ridge, we started to see signs of wind-loading like small cornices, drifted snow, and wind-textured surface snow. We also started to feel the upper part of the snowpack becoming more firm and consolidated with softer snow below it. We stayed on lower angle slopes but we did find some small test slopes to try and get information from without exposing ourselves to larger wind-loaded slopes. Ski kicks on these wind-loaded test slopes caused shooting cracks that propagated up to 10 ft away from our ski tips on ENE, N, and NW aspects.

We could barely make out the crown to a recent avalanche farther up the ridge and could see some debris across the slope from us. To get more details we would have needed to continue up through steep wind-loaded terrain, so we decided to turn around rather than taking our chances with potential wind slabs. We chose to descend our low angle skin track back down the ridge to a spot where we could drop off the ridge into sheltered terrain using low angle slopes. We continued to descend low angle terrain back to the car.