Couple more.....
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Couple more.....
Three more.....
Two more......
......and finally........thanks for your patience.........
This avalanche rolled a full 3000 feet down the mountain and across the small alpine valley. We were on a bench halfway up the facing mountain and about 3500 feet directly across from the center of the test mountain. The roar when the avy moved into the valley was immense, and the powder cloud curled up to less than 1000 feet below us. The valley took a few more control avalanches before we went in for the equipment.That shot of the open mouth on the dragon is going on the wall......
There is a control avalanche picture sequence or 2 left if anyone still hasn't gone snowblind from looking at all that whiteness. Just to take a break from the snow here's a bunch of gratuitous chopper shots from the testing..............thanks to Chris from Selkirk Mountain Helicopters Ltd in Revelstoke.
Hovering over the debris field after avalanche test number one in a vain search for an exposed lift bag or crash test dummy appendage.....
Ghost ship inbound to landing zone.....where's that lens cap?.....
Love the little green and red lights man.........
Bell turning overhead....
Bird on the LZ.........
Adam and Eve on the longline.......
Dropping off Adam and Eve on the mountain................
Inbound.......
Running a little hot.......
Getting in position to bring down this cornice.........
A little dust off the top..........
Landing Zone flyover........
Chopper (upper right) and control avalanche number one snow veil......
Coming in for landing............
Another cornice destined for the bottom.........
Bird over the avalanche debris field.............
Open door for tossing big 'ole bombs..........
He sure don't look like a mad bomber.........
Long Ranger.......
Eve nears the top for avalanche test number 3............
Bell and cornice, test number 3.........
This is the avalanche we SHOULD have had crash test dummies on the hill for, and didn’t. This was a control avalanche where we tried to bring down the large cornice, sweep the upper mountainside and smash the snow onto a large bench halfway up the mountain. We figured if enough snow got to the bench it would clear the entire mountain. This was done to make the valley below safe to enter to find and get our equipment. The cornice had been bombed to both the left and right, but the bomb on the left punched through the cornice and slid halfway down the mountain to the bench below. You can see this first bomb detonate on the bench about half way through this series of avalanche pictures. The slide was perfect for a test of our flotation system as it was more realistic of the size of a slide that a skier, boarder or snowmobiler would get caught in. Class 2 maybe, with a couple hundred feet of runout, as opposes to half a mile, like all our other tests produced this year. After this avalanche we figured that the mountain was not going to slide, so we moved far left and did a control avalanche that sent a school bus sized chunk of the cornice all the way down the hill. The chunk impacts the valley below like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We’ll post that series soon, and there are a shot or two of the chunk going in. The video is Primo, but we don’t know how to post the stuff yet………….………
Here you can see the cornice ripping off in the far left upper corner of the pic.
The cornice begins to fall.....
Starts to rip off the top.....
Here she comes.......
Look out below.....
Here's the first bomb going off on the bench..........
The slide gathers momentum as the bomb shakes the bench.....
The avalanche is starting to push a lot of snow.......
A lot of rumbling going on at this point with the echoing of the bomb and the avy itself...
Coming down....
Gathering steam....
The little avalanche that could.....
Stretching out.........