""This is a kind of avalanche that releases on an old layer of snow we call a 'persistent weak layer,' Greene told SFGATE. "Those types of weak layers typically form when you have calm weather, clear skies, cold nights, and you get these formations in the snowpack that can be a really dangerous, weak layer when they're buried.""
""This has just been very sad for all of us," David Reichel, the executive director of the Sierra Avalanche Center, told SFGATE on Wednesday. "That's the primary emotion.""
A sequence of mid-February storms followed an unusually dry January in the Sierra Nevada, producing rapid, heavy snowfall and gale-force winds. The Sierra Avalanche Center upgraded an avalanche watch to an urgent warning, rating danger at 4 of 5, before a late-morning storm-slab avalanche struck. The slide occurred north of downtown Truckee and killed at least eight people on a three-day backcountry ski trip. Forecasters classified the event as a storm slab that released on a persistent weak layer formed during calm, clear, cold conditions; heavy new snow and wind loading overwhelmed the fragile snowpack.
Read at SFGATE
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