I noticed that the risk was shown as moving from 4 to 3 during the day yesterday? I would have expected it to risk during the day rather than decrease. This implies I would be safer skiing off piste in the afternoon rather than the morning. Is this normal?

On Friday to Saturday night there was a foehn/chinook - strong warm wind from the south west. As well as messing with the snow this brought warm air to high elevations, it was around 5 degrees at 1800 meters. This would have meant lots of natural avalanche activity say from 2500 meters downwards as the snow melted, water got underneath between the ground and snowpack or other sliding surface and the snowpack. The snowpack would have gotten denser although overall still weighed the same, dont know if this makes any difference? Anway this would have caused a lot of activity. The temperature dropped down to freezing around dawn so I guess by mid day the forecasters reckoned most that was coming down came down and the return to cold temperatures would have stabilized the rest. There was certainly a bit of a crust off piste on Saturday afternoon.

Remember that risk 3 is still in the upper end of the risk matrix for backcountry skiing etc so not to be taken lightly.

I guess the skier triggered risk was probably 3 i.e. localized avalanches capable of being triggered by a single skier.

So in theory off piste in the afternoon would have been safer, at least where natural slides are concerned.

That’s my 2c anyways.

Rim

I thought that was strange too, especially as we had more snow while the risk level dropped. But the snowpack did indeed seem to stabilise between the 15th and the 16th afternoon. On Saturday it wasn’t too hard to trigger slabs on steeper slopes, whereas by Sunday morning the layer on which the sliding was happening on Saturday wasn’t there any more. Maybe someone with more experience can explain why this was?

thanks that makes sense, normally everyone wants to make an early start but I suppose that is more a spring thing