Twice this week, very strong westerly winds and lots and lots of readily transportable snow caused widespread natural avalanches in the region.  While deep powder now obscures the evidence of most of this week's avalanche activity, several of the most recent natural avalanches (some visible from Cache Valley) stepped down into early season snow or the ground and definitely fit into the huge and unsurvivable category.

 Topping the local news are two natural monsters that furiously descended into Providence Canyon early Friday morning. "The Big One" ran almost 3000' vertical feet and hit the well-traveled Providence Canyon Road with tons of stick-filled debris, and First Waterfall Hollow pulled out full width running around 2500' and slamming the Rock Quarry.  Both avalanches encompassed ~100% of the paths, and stepped down to weak sugary snow near the ground with crown lines averaging 4 to 6 feet deep and many hundreds of feet wide.

You come around the corner low on the Providence Canyon Road and you run into this nasty stick-fill deposition covering the road, which had melted down to bare ground a couple weeks ago.

Darren is standing on the road looking up "the Big One"

We walked straight up the debris filled gully

The debris made vertical ice-walls on the gully sides.

The huge avalanche triggered a separate, smaller pocket ~1000' below the main crown.

Releasing on a thin layer of faceted snow, the lower crown is 3-4' deep and~100' wide.

Once in motion, the avalanche stepped down, cleaning out all the faceted snow to the ground.

The huge avalanche encompassed the full width of both major forks in the big slide path.

The primary crown on at northwest facing slope at around 8500' is somewhere in the 1/3-mile-wide category, averaging 4 to 6 feet deep.

I could barely stick a pencil in the hard crown layered with stiff drifted snow.

From the summit of Big Baldy I traversed into the north-northeast facing First Waterfall Hollow and realized that it had also avalanched in a big way.

It ran on depth hoar on the ground, full width, ~6' deep.