Tuckerman Ravine (or Tucks as it is affectionately referred to) is a glacial cirque on the east side of Mount Washington that is an extremely popular backcountry spring skiing location. Since so much snow is loaded into this bowl shaped ravine through the course of the winter, one can typically find at least some snow there until early July, sometimes later on really good snow years with cool springtime and early summer temps. Tuckerman Ravine also happens to be one of the few places on the East coast that sees natural avalanche activity due to the steep slopes found there. Also, the only American avalanche center east of the Rockies forecasts avalanche danger for the Ravine on a daily basis from sometime in late November to early May on average.

As I wrote about in my post a few days ago, the summit received 13.8 inches of snow with high winds last Wednesday and Thursday. I showed the effect that that much snow blowing around had up here on the summit, but it also has a huge effect in a place like Tuckerman Ravine. Enough snow blew in the ravine from this event to form 'slabs' (layers of packed, wind loaded snow) that were as deep as 3 to 4 feet in a lot of places in the ravine. These new slabs were extremely dangerous one and two days after the event while temperatures remained cold, but became dangerous in a different way when temperatures quickly rose above freezing Friday afternoon and stayed there.

When a new layer of snow warms quickly like this, it can cause it to become unstable because of how heavy it becomes and because of bonds that break down within the snow because of all the water. Although the snow often isn't unstable enough to avalanche, or slide, naturally on its own, sometimes all it takes is one person skiing on that snow to set it off, or in some cases 30 or 40 skiers. Such was the case in Tucks this past Saturday when thousands of people were in the ravine.Three slides were triggered by skiers or snowboarders through the course of the day. Thankfully and luckily, no one was injured from these avalanches. Two of the three were caught on video (not by me), which is fairly rare.

Here is the video for the second slide of the day. The fracture from the first slide is visible to the right of this one:

Pretty amazing that they guy rode it out like he did. What is also amazing, and not in a good way, is that people were actually cheering when this happened. I don't care why people were cheering, this sort of thing is serious and should never be 'celebrated'. Not only did the guy put himself in danger by skiing a part of the ravine that had already slid once that day, but he put anyone that was below him in danger, as well as anybody that might have had to rescue him if he wasn't so lucky and able to ride it out. A series of poor decisions indeed.

Now here's the video of the third slide of the day:

http://p.webshots.com/flash/smallplayer.swf?videoFile=http://videoserve.webshots.com/video/28876/3035887350060201085EMLQOR_v_0.flv&audio=on&displayImagePreview=http://videothumb37.webshots.com/thumb/28876/3035887350060201085EMLQORstill_002_0.jpg&videoPageUrl=http://outdoors.webshots.com/video/3035887350060201085EMLQOR&autoPlay=false&shareLink=http://cards.webshots.com/ecard/personalize?photoId=3035887350060201085%26source=v

Again, poor decision making, and yet again people are cheering. Crazy.

This is an unfortunate side effect of a true backcountry skiing destination with true backcountry dangers having such incredibly easy access. People forget where they are and get complacent. A very dangerous combination.

Tomorrow you will see a report from some skiing I did on the same day. I was on a different part of Mount Washington, where I did my own assesement of the snow stability and determined it was safe to ski. Always check the latest avalanche report (also available on the Observatory's website) before heading onto the mountain and of course, good ol' common sense goes a long way too.

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