This is going to be a special update that isn't going to have anything to do with the weather, but certainly has a lot to do with skiing in New England! I figured with the onset of spring and a quiet few days of weather ahead, you guys wouldn't mind.

A lot of folks don't realize it, but there are actually a handful of locations in New England that do experience natural avalanches. Mount Washington (elevation 6,288 feet) and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire certainly has the most frequent, most widespread, and biggest avalanches. With treeline at about 4,000 feet above sea level in the Presidentials, an average of around 300 inches of snow annually, and some of the highest winds anywhere on the planet, there is plenty of avalanche prone terrain. Mount Washington is also home to the country's oldest avalanche forecast center, and the only forecast center east of the Rockies. 

This past weekend a rare location for avalanches, the summit cone snowfields, slid big:

Photo credit: Joe Klementovich Photography (pulled from his Instagram account)

The crown was generally 3-4 feet thick and over 600 feet wide. The debris field (seen above) was estimated at around 20 feet deep in places. In fact, it was the biggest slide on the summit cone ever recorded according to the snow rangers. Although the snowfields are certainly classified as avalanche terrain, they don't often slide and very rarely slide big. These snowfields are a place that I spent quite a bit of time during my six year tenure working for the Mount Washington Observatory. During the mid-winter months, I tended to head to the snowfields rather than the steeper gullies and couloirs around the mountain because of the relative safety of the terrain with respect to avalanches, not to mention that I could get a couple of quick laps in over the course of an hour break from work. Of course, I always kept in the back of my mind that I was technically in avalanche terrain, but I also knew that it would take a very special set of conditions to actually make the fields slide. Apparently that set of conditions was met this past weekend!

The best part about all this? There were no fatalities. Heck, there weren't even any injuries. Anyone that knows how many people are on Mount Washington on any given weekend knows how unlikely that is with a slide this big in a location that sees a particularly large amount of traffic.

A couple of volunteers for the Mount Washington Observatory witnessed the slide from below and recorded their experience here. The snow rangers at the Mount Washington Avalanche Center also posted their offical summary of the incident. It's a good read, and you can check it out on their website.