Avalanche: Ben Lomond

Here are some photos of the natural avalanche cycle on Ben Lomond from the last big storm cycle. It appears that there were multiple events of releasing and reloading. The first layer of snow which was 14 inches of blower landed on the dirty hard wind hammered surface crust on March 31st. There wasn't a whisper of wind that day and the snow was epic face shots. Over the next several days, the wind kicked up crossloading and toploading along with another series of snowstorms piling up another 3 feet of snow with high water weights causing multiple density inversions. It appears the slides ran on these density inversions and graupel layers pooled in the lower angle terrain toward the latter part of the storm last Monday and Tuesday.