Powder Cloud

For those of you who find yourselves champing at the bit, ready to start skiing in October, I’m going to put this out front—I’m not a big fan of early snowfalls. To me, having enough snow to ski before mid-November is no cause for celebration. Just the opposite, in fact. In many cases, early snow is followed by a dry spell before winter really takes hold. Or we get rain-on-snow events followed by colder weather.

Hey, Northerners! Have you ever skied soft snow, weeks after the last storm, that has been preserved by the mid-winter bitter cold? Some call it recycled powder or settled powder, but it’s actually an undocumented type of snow. Colloquially known as urnal near-surface facets. These facets may preserve good skiing while on the surface, but once buried, they often create a persistent weak layer for avalanches.

At the end of last season we talked about managing storm slabs and wind slabs. While nothing about avalanches is simple, these problems exist in the upper layers of the snowpack so they are more visible than others and the issues tend to be, relatively speaking, short-lived, as the instability generally lasts only days or perhaps a week. In this article we’ll delve into the murky world of hidden problems that come back to haunt you long after the weak layer is buried—when you may least expect it.

On Jan. 8, 2022, Hannah Nash, 25, and Drake Oversen, 35, and their dog, Valerie, of Colorado Springs, Colo., went missing after heading out on a casual snowshoe to Crystal Lake, a popular winter and summer destination on Hoosier Pass. They carried no avalanche gear—beacon, shovel, probe—and had no intention of walking through avalanche terrain.

A guy I call Mustachioed Ray showed me skin rolling on the windy ridge above Turnagain Pass. He said it saves the glue and makes them easier to deal with in the wind. “I’ve been rolling this pair for five years.” he told me. Like everyone, I doubted him, so I decided to try it with a pair of skins I hated. After two years of rolling those dreadful skins 100 days a year, the glue was still so good I finally just gave up and threw them in the trash.

We were dropping into our last line of the trip. I called it Bunny Love, because there were paw prints from two snowshoe rabbits leading up to the edge and then impressions from them sitting side by side. It was just before dusk, the setting sun turning our tracks through the light, fluffy powder into shadows. My friend was skiing a film-worthy line, grinning from ear to ear as we hooted and hollered from the safe zone below.

If you’ve been busy climbing and mountain biking in the desert and missed the news, it’s an El Niño year this season. Now that winter’s arrived, we’ll soon know how accurate the predictions are. The Climate Predication Center’s most recent update from Nov. 27 states, “El Niño conditions are observed, equatorial sea surface temperatures are above average across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean.

The Powder Cloud is dedicated to providing you the education and mentorship required to travel safely and find the happiness in the backcountry. We’d like to ask for your support—for our scrappy editorial team, our wise and experienced contributors and to help us develop new and creative ways to educate all backcountry skiers and riders. If you are able, please consider supporting us. Thank you and we appreciate you.

The Powder Cloud is dedicated to providing you the education and mentorship required to travel safely and find the happiness in the backcountry. We’d like to ask for your support—for our scrappy editorial team, our wise and experienced contributors and to help us develop new and creative ways to educate all backcountry skiers and riders. If you are able, please consider supporting us. Thank you and we appreciate you.