Utah Avalanche Center

Calm winds with light S1 snowfall. Skiing was surfy with an inverted graupel layer under the surface snow. Only avalanche results I saw were loose dry running on surface isolated to skis. Some isolated cracking anywhere the wind had moved snow around.

This was a small slope adjacent to the larger slide path along the groomed road.

Facets at 36 cm did break and propagate (ECTP) after 33 taps which included 3 really hard hits. This slope is a little bit wind loaded but total snow depth was similar to depth in many other places.

South facing snow pit in open area on south side of Wilson Peak. Failure at 57cm was later (27 taps) but had more snap to it. Hard to tell with frozen edges-but this would be the level of the November PWL.

Profile dug next to avalanche reported to have occurred on 12.28.2022. Avalanche was 75' wide, ran for 125' into the gully. Average crown height was 2.5' and deepest was close to 4'. SS-U -R2-D2. Gully feature allowed snow to pile up deep enough be classified as a D2. Hard to tell what the trigger was. There was a ski track approximately 50' to the the skiers left side. ECTX x 2 although we had failure when prying on the block after the ECTX results. Failed primarily above the ice lens-although the skiers left flank had failure below the ice lens.

Pit dug low elevation above Butler Fork Access trail. Looking to see how rain affected the faceted layer from November. Facets were 4f- @43cm off of ground and failure was planar with propagation after ECTX under the 1f dirt layer

We traversed across the slope and noticed shooting cracks. Initial thought was that it was a storm slab from the previous two days accumulation of 19" @ 2.6 SWE. Closer inspection revealed failure on facets so we decided to do a profile.