Republic

We headed up Republic with the intention of skiing one of the north couloirs but decided against it once we reached the top. We still managed to drop a fairly large cornice down one of them, triggering a soft slab that ran a ways into the apron below but didn’t step down to anything deeper. While side hilling on the solar side of the East ridge on the way back down towards our skin track we felt a very substantial wumph. Yesterday’s new snow was heating up rapidly by that point, but given our sheltered location and how big the collapse felt my hunch is that this may have been the surface hoar layer that was buried early last month.