It's being called "the most interesting avalanche of the season."
And "an entirely new type of avalanche."
These superlatives from the Utah Avalanche Center whirl around a slide that broke Monday on a steep, north-facing hillside just below the bypass road between Snowbird and Alta. The road exists because of the avalanche threat to the main highway on the opposite side of Little Cottonwood Canyon.
The slab broke off 3 feet deep and 50 feet wide, sliding all 150 feet down the 36 degree pitch to the creek bottom. Isolated from the public by the road's configuration, the slide path is unlikely to endanger anyone. But its location intrigued UDOT's avalanche team, one of the world's most respected, as well as Avalanche Center forecaster Drew Hardesty
"Public nuisance" was the name assigned the new slide path by UDOT's crew, directed by Liam Fitzgerald.
"The slab was as abnormal as anything I've ever witnessed," wrote team member Adam Nesbit in a report Wednesday on the Avalanche Center's daily forecast.
It looked almost like asphalt -- "a conglomerate slab with ice chunks, road material and everything else that gets picked up by a front-end loader doing it's morning rounds," Nesbit said. It was weird in other ways, too. The avalanche experts could not pinpoint the weak layer that failed. And their standard stability tests were "useless.
"A little disturbed by the whole experience, we settled on a theory of rapid loading without prior sufficient compaction," he added.
The avalanche threat Wednesday was rated moderate in most places but "considerable" in sheltered, mid- to low-elevation northerly slopes. "Sunnier aspects will also rapidly warm beyond safe travel by mid- to late morning, as well," Hardesty said.
