Belleayre, NY Wet Avalanche

**tBatt** · 12-25-2020, 10:33 PM

6.5" Rain took the snowpack out to the ground. Wet avalanche damaged some mountain infrastructure.

https://cbs6albany.com/news/local/av...ain-ski-center

A few more from facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid...70509192969080

https://www.facebook.com/raymond.sca...8582792362196/

**m2711c** · 12-25-2020, 11:16 PM

i wonder if the ground had a chance to freeze before they started to make snow there this year.... that's an impressive crown.

**wolfelot** · 12-25-2020, 11:31 PM

Wow. That’s crazy. It’s interesting all of the incidents of recorded slides over the years that have happened in places you don’t expect.

**Jonathan S.** · 12-26-2020, 02:57 PM

I'm pretty sure that qualifies as a Slush Avalanche:

https://avalanche.org/avalanche-encyclopedia/avalanche/

"An oddity in most of the avalanche world, slush avalanches usually occur in very northern latitudes such as the Brooks Range of Alaska or in northern Norway. They’re unusual because they occur on very gentle slopes compared with other avalanches, typically 5-20 degrees and they rarely occur on slopes steeper than 25 degrees. A typical slush avalanche occurs in impermeable permafrost soil, which allows water to pool up, and occurs during rapid saturation of a thin, weak snowpack. When water saturates the snowpack, it catastrophically looses its strength and the resulting slush often runs long distances on very gentle terrain. Once again, very few people are killed by slush avalanches possibly because so few people live in high latitude permafrost mountains. But they can certainly be dangerous to people camped in the wrong spot or structures built in the wrong locations."

*****

Having skied a few times many years ago at Belleayre, although definitely not a Very Northern Latitude, that place has decent pitches only on the very upper portions. Near the lodge, the pitch is very gentle, i.e., those FB pics are capturing the true pitch, or rather the lack thereof.