[patroller420]

Oh Man............I cant believe this. I got the Impression that Morgan was the smartest of all the people out there. I was kind of expecting to hear something like this but I thought it would be the group of skiers without beacons. WHY WEHY WHY did they have to take the wrong route?
When we came out Sunday it was Tiptoe through amine field even on the low route. Why would anyone try to traverse those hills with those conditions.

RIP MORGAN

[Mr. T]

Thanks for the beautiful pictures. As an occasional visitor to the Sierras, I am reminded how the textures and general shapes of the trees and mountains have been imprinted in my mind through the many Ansel Adams pictures I had seen as a child. The pictures in the posts add the element of color to "the range of light". Have fun touring!

[patroller420]

More to the story:



Morgan and Jason came to the hut late saturday evening. Morgan came first as Jason was on snowshoes. As we waited for Jason outside Morgan told me he didnt have a space in the Hut and was going to pitch his tent outside. No way I told him. It was going to be bad and we had room for him to crash on the floor. We sat out Sunday mornig about 8:50 am for home. We had clear weather but the wind was blowing about 40 mph with higher gust. Morgan and Jason had planned to do a run or two and head out. I was told they left around noon and it got bad. They spent the night in a tent around Heather lake. They woke up Monday to more dumping and tried to get out in whiteout.
I dont know if they had a GPS but they got lost and were on the watchtower trail when it happened.
Death was from Trauma.

Man Im so sorry to hear this.

[Kara]

Thanks for the TR.
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Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day.

[seki]

So sorry to hear this. My condolences to all.

[Lucy]

420 and SFantastico, thanks for sharing your encounter with them. I feel shaken just reading about it, but it cuts close to the bone for you. Thankfully you trusted your judgement and made the routefinding decisions that you did on Sunday.

[millhouse]

Hi all. Please read my post on the thread "Avy Death in Sequoia". I was involved in the recovery and search.
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Get Real!

[millhouse]

ok one thing. How did you determine that the snowpack was very stable? I find it very hard to believe that it was so. I spend a ton of time in the area and had skied out on thursday when it was collapsing and whumphing all around me. I hardly think of that as stable. From other reports from other folks it seems that they felt it unstable as well. In light of recent events I highly doubt that it was "very Stable".
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Get Real!

[drop'n'in]

Obviously, I can only speak for the slope that we were on. As you know, the soccer field is pretty low angle, with only a couple of short steep sections. I'm not sure how much new snow you got on Thursday, but there was no significant snow on Friday, as the track had barely a trace in it. When we climbed up out of Heather Lake, we went around the corner a ways and looked at the steep sections at the end of the soccer field run. One of the last times we were there, these slopes had many natural slides and we bailed back to the Hump. There was no evidence of natural activity on Saturday. As we climbed up the ridge above Heather Lake, we didn't experience any whumping or settling. The slopes were pretty windblown, but there weren't any big windslabs deposited in middle steep section, as we've seen in the past. On our descent, when we got to the steep section in the trees, we assumed that the winds could have deposited a lot of snow down here. We ski cut one of the steepest roll-overs, and there wasn't a hint of movement. After we finished that section, we both felt that the snow seemed very consolidated and stable, with no settling, whumping, or movement of any sort. On our second lap, the slopes that drop into Heather Lake are on the windward side, and a western exposure. No sign of wind slabs, in fact the top was thin as the wind had scoured the snow off the slopes. These slopes had now had two days of sun on them and the snow seemed consolidated. Again, I ski cut the top of the chute, and no sign of instability.

No doubt conditions changed dramatically on Saturday night and Sunday. We didn't like the thought of the rain/heavy wet snow on top of what was there, and the winds were obviously raging. As we were sitting in the Lodgepole campground, we could see huge plumes of snow being blown off the upper ridges of the Tokopah Valley, and we new a lot of snow was getting moved around, so we just packed up and headed for home.

So, were the slopes we were on 'very stable'? Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. I can only say that they were very much more stable than many times I have been there in the past, and we felt very comfortable skiing them.

[patroller420]

This trip was my first time to the west side so Im not familliar with the snow over there but It seemed we found lots of isolated pockets of Instability. Some slopes seemed bomber and just as the confidence would build we would skin something and "whomp".
So from Thursday-sunday I was a little nervous.
We got settlement around Matterhorn and in the creek drainage below the hut on Friday and Saturday.
But as stated things have changed sinse then . Sunday was scary as hell getting out of therer and untill there is some warming and these dumps of 3-4 feet of wet snow stabilize I would not recommend travel in that area