Chose to go into the belly of the beast today. Knew we were threading a thin needle today and turns out we were right. PWL plus about 6-10" HST and Moderate to strong West winds made for a touchy day in the mountains.

We had every red flag jump out at us today. Tree shaking collapses, shooting cracks almost every step and a D1.5 natural. Several times acknowledged how specific we needed to be with terrain and travel and felt like we could continue managing the hazard through careful and conservative route finding. Found ourselves at the back of the drainage where it becomes more of a bowl feature. We discussed our options and moved to stay in the densely treed area that has more of a North westerly aspect. Found ourselves pinched between the obvious 30+ degree avalanche terrain and the denser steep trees on a convex roll. Not feeling great about where we found ourselves there was talk about turning around, but the decision was made to move forward one at a time. I stayed inside a denser stand of trees while Weston moved out towards the more open slope when he triggered a relatively small pocket above him. Soft slab roughly 2' deep and broke about 6 feet above him and broke 60 feet wide. The slab did not push him down so he was left standing watching the initial debris move downhill. Soon after the debris flushed by him I watched as another slab release further around the bowl and yelled "Avalanche" as the larger mass of debris flushed below. All said and done the small slab Weston triggered sympathetically triggered several pockets from the NW to N aspects of the bowl. We estimate that the avalanche event traveled roughly 400' wide and ran anywhere from 60'-500' depending on which pocket we were looking at. Estimating D2 R3.

All and all we feel any unintentionally triggered avalanche (Especially while skinning) is a mistake. However, after much debriefing and discussion we do think that we moved through the mountains with a lot of consideration today and had some hypothesis about what we expected to happen and well... turns out we were right. Our main takeaways are that we got ourselves in a pinch between hard travel and suspect terrain. Instead of turning back and finding another option or just calling it we kept moving forward. After the avalanche, we did circle back and found a low angle more treed ramp and had a great day skiing deep pow in <30 trees.

Failed on facets

A view of the whole aftermath.