Avalanche Safety Device tested

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Another cornice destined for the bottom.........

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Bird over the avalanche debris field.............

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Open door for tossing big 'ole bombs..........

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He sure don't look like a mad bomber.........

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Long Ranger.......

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Eve nears the top for avalanche test number 3............

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Bell and cornice, test number 3.........

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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.

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The cornice begins to fall.....

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Starts to rip off the top.....

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Here she comes.......

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Look out below.....

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Here's the first bomb going off on the bench..........

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The slide gathers momentum as the bomb shakes the bench.....

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The avalanche is starting to push a lot of snow.......

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A lot of rumbling going on at this point with the echoing of the bomb and the avy itself...

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Coming down....

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Gathering steam....

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The little avalanche that could.....

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Stretching out.........

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Rollin', rollin', rollin'......

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Keep that avy rollin'.......

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Rollin', rollin', rollin', rawhide.........

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Only 5 more...........

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4..............