This snowpack is no joke

We encountered surprising and unnerving persistent slab instabilities today in the Middle Fork, demanding extra cautious terrain selection.  

• 4" to 10" of relatively low density snow overnight. The new snow produced numerous very thin storm slabs and sluffs during last night's storm, both of these instabilities were trending towards less reactive by this afternoon.  
• We observed two recent D3 debris piles that nearly reached the creek.  We ascended one bedsurface to investigate; it appears that these were slab avalanches that ran last night during the storm. The crowns were about 2 feet thick, failing at or just below the 3/24 interface.  The debris was larger than expected because it gouged through isothermal wet snow at lower elevations.  
• We continued ascending to ridgeline at 5,900', conducting multiple stability tests enroute. All of the tests produced non-propagating results above the 3/24 crust.  While stepping out of skis at ridgetop, we remotely triggered a large (D2.5) persistent slab avalanche that propagated several hundred yards wide, about 2 to 3 feet thick. It failed on a faceted crust sandwich (3/21-3/24 layers) on an east aspect and wrapped to a northeast aspect, where the same interface was simply near-surface facets. 
• This avalanche was particularly troublesome and surprising because:
  • 1) it initiated on relatively low slope angles, as low as 32 degrees, terrain that infrequently produces avalanches.
  • 2) stability tests gave false stable results on fairly representative slopes and feedback was limited.  We did get a collapse at 4,100' on flat terrain, but dismissed it as an isolated refreezing crust situation.