Natural storm slab and wind slab avalanches on small slopes.

We toured on Andesite Peak today, using familiar terrain with test slope opportunities to gather data. We saw several natural storm slab avalanches 6 to 8" deep in the new snow around noon that had occurred on steep test slopes. We saw these on all aspects on the sides of several large boulders. We also intentionally triggered one of these storm slabs on another test slope in the same area. We had very minimal cracking while breaking trail, with our skin track penetrating much deeper than the depth of the storm slab instability.

Moving higher into above treeline terrain, we saw the crown of a natural wind slab avalanche on a wind loaded NE aspect test slope. Due to the small size of the terrain, the avalanche was only size D1.

We poked at a few other above treeline NE to E aspect slopes, but did not trigger any additional wind slab avalanches. Several slopes in this area avalanched yesterday. We did not see any new avalanches on larger slopes in the area.

Snowfall was S5 for nearly all of our time on tour from 11:45 am to 2:30 pm. On the exit our old track was covered by about 4 inches of additional snowfall.