The burning snowpack stability question that keeps racing through my mind is... can I trigger an avalanche that breaks into weak layers of snow, and if so... where?

There's so many variables right now, and let's face it, our snowpack structure behaves like it's in its teenage years... yeah, it's quite complex. Not the kind of complexity like we see on lean snow years with weak, rotten, trap door kinda snow. Instead, complexity that revolves around a snowpack that in some places is strong, thick, and stable, and a few hundred yards away is unusually thin and weak for mid February.

Rather than stay awake all night trying to figure out which exact slope is sketchy and gonna roll me, I break it down in my mind, catalog different avalanche characteristics in my cerebral Rolodex, and attempt to avoid a paper cut to my frontal lobe. I'm looking at the big picture... a common 30,000 foot view. And all the recent avalanches I've been crawling around and investigating have been triggered in upper elevation, steep, rocky terrain with a shallow, weak snowpack on slopes facing the north half of the compass. The complex notion is... these slopes are thin because they've either avalanched multiple times this year, like Sunday's close call in Chalk Creek, or they've been stripped by one wind event and then reloaded by another wind event from a different direction... or both! Now of course, my mind is spinning!

Knowing I'm not going to outsmart this avalanche dragon, we instead agree to disagree. I'll avoid steep, rocky, mid and upper elevation terrain facing the north half of the compass, where the odds of triggering a slide lessen over time, but the consequences remain severe. I'll stick with lower angle shady slopes, or if I wanna get in bigger terrain, I simply switch aspect and head to the sunnies.

With all the great riding to be had, there's no reason the pull on the dogs tail, cause its bite is worse than its bark!