[MCR] Rockies, Healy Pass area, Storm Mountain Fire Break

I guided a ski ascent of a small peak about 1 kilometre east of Healy Pass on March 12th. A size 2 slab avalanche had slid out of the looker's left hand shoulder of the second slide path. The crown looked to be as deep as one metre and about 40 metres wide. I suspect that it was a fresh wind slab. The debris ran to the lower part of the track, but not into the runout zone. The slide did not trigger any deeper layers. We restricted our travel to low angle terrain.

Yesterday, March 13th, I instructed my AST 2 class in the Storm Mountain Fire Break in Kootenay Park. Only a couple centimetres of new snow in the Stanley Valley parking lot when we got there. We set an ascending track from the parking lot to the top of the fire break. Once we had 7 people standing in one spot there we got a large whompfing settlement on what I guessed was the basal facetes. Some of the fracture line was visible to us 10 metres up slope, thankfully the slope is only about 15 degrees there (not avalanche terrain). We got several easy compression test results there on the Valentines surface hoar layer down 60 centimetres (snowpack depth was 160 cms -the top half bounded snow, the bottom faceted junk). These observations very much validated the day's hazard forecast of High in the alpine, High at treeline, and Considerable below treeline. We made a run down the fire break which has been seeing a lot of skier traffic and needs more snow to cover old tracks. While
training in the bottom of the fire break we had about an hour of snowfall of 3-4 cms/hour and when we got back to the parking lot there was about 8 cms of new snow lying on the ground there.

Happy trails,

Barry Blanchard
Mountain Guide
www.barryblanchard.ca
www.yamnuska.com

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