Wet and unstable at Buck

Today we rode along Buck Ridge through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Yellowmule, McAtee Basin and into the head of Bear Creek. We saw numerous dry slab avalanches that broke over the last 10 days. Some of these slides were on small gully walls and some broke a hundreds of feet wide and ran a couple hundred vertical feet. 

We also saw a number of natural wet slab avalanches that broke yesterday or the day before. There were at least five of these slides on Cedar Mtn and one in Third Yellowmule. There were also many recent wet loose avalanches.

We dug a snowpit on a SE facing slope at 9500 ft near the head of Bear Creek. The snowpack was only two feet thick here. 1/2 slab - 1/2 facets. At noon, the top 3" were wet and it was moist to the ground. We got ECTP3 and ECTPV test results on the top of the facets. These are very unstable results. As we were leaving our snowpit we got the whole slope to collapse, at least 50 feet out. This shows that we were already primed for wet slabs and there were still many more hours of sunshine and heat to deteriorate conditions as the afternoon went on.