Avalanche warning in place across Central Oregon

With an increase in snow comes an increased chance of avalanches, experts warn.

Clifford Agocs, a professional level 2 avalanche-certificated ski guide from Oregon Ski Guides, said Monday different weather conditions and different weather patterns create different avalanche problems.

Those problems, he said, behave in different ways, which help them understand what they are looking at and what to avoid when they are in backcountry.

Agocs said the problems they find today help inform the plan for tomorrow, but it’s not a guarantee that will be the problem or that there won’t be new ones.

“Every time we’re going to ski in terrain that’s steep enough to avalanche,’ Agocs said, “we need to do an evaluation of whether the snow is stable or not in the location we want to ski.”

Agocs said conditions change from day to day, as well as from morning to afternoon, and there can even be multiple types of avalanche problems simultaneously.

There are many different types of avalanche problems.

They range from a loose dry problem, which is the release of dry, unconsolidated snow to a loose wet problem, which is the release of wet, unconsolidated snow or slush.

There are also problems like a storm slab, a wet slab and a persistent slab, which is the release of a cohesive layer of soft to hard snow

Agocs said one of the most common problems in Central Oregon is a wind slab.

“If you can image what you think of as a classic snowflake, wind can kind of get those snowflakes to mesh together, and they actually hold together really well. And that’s what we call a slab.” Agocs said. “So they are kind of grabbing onto each other, and that cohesion is what creates a slab of snow that can slide off a slope as a unit.”

Visit the KTVZ Weather page to see the latest in weather alerts and avalanche warnings.