Valentine’s Day Introduced 100-Yr Avalanche to Mt. Shasta

When Chris Carr of Shasta Mountain Guides in Mt. Shasta, California, headed up the mountain final week to the well-known Bunny Flat space, he discovered a shock: an avalanche ripped off the higher mountain and traveled greater than 4 miles, coming inside a half-mile of Bunny Flat. As Carr notes, “Avalanches are usually not uncommon on Mt. Shasta, nevertheless avalanches of this dimension and scale are, and this falls within the 100-year class of snow slides. The final snow avalanche of this dimension was 1996, which was nonetheless considerably smaller than the present.”

Shasta’s January snowpack began off robust, with 160 % of regular precip within the early weeks earlier than settling right down to about common. Then the mountain “obtained a number of toes of chilly snow after which skilled a fast warming with the following system bringing heavy quantities of rain to the snowpack. This state of affairs creates a doubtlessly unstable construction and ‘the other way up’ snowpack ripe for instability. The outcome being the massive damaging avalanche we noticed (R4/D4). We have been lucky the Everett Freeway entry highway to the trailhead was closed when this slide is estimated to have occurred and there was nobody on the mountain on the time.”

The slide took out timber and the whole lot else in its go. It traveled 5,000 vertical toes, was as much as 300 toes broad, and left a 35-foot deep trench. Particles at its terminus is 30 toes deep.

Hold monitor of Shasta situations and information from the sector by way of Shasta Mountain Guides’ weblog. Photographs by Chris Carr

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