Widespread Whoomphing in Sheep Creek

Toured up Sheep Creek Trail on the West side of the Lionhead Range on 1/11/2025. We heard whoomphing through out our tour in. We stopped counting after 12. Some of these whoomphs seemed relatively far away and very loud. We could not tell if these farther whoomphs were triggered by us. We were the only ones in our location but we did hear snowmobiles in another location near the trailhead. We also felt multiple large collapses on very low angle slopes and skinning across non consequential terrain. 

We dug a pit on an East facing aspect below the slope we had planned to ride. The height of snow was about 110 cm and there was a very concerning layer of large facets at 75cm deep going to the ground. There were no other layers of concern in the snowpack we found and the rest of the snowpack was right side up. Our results were CT17 SPQ2 and ECTP26 SCQ1. Bother failures during tests were on the layer of facets and on the CT and ECT our columns easily separated from the facet layer after failure. Due to these observations we opted not to ride our objective and followed our skin track back out to the trailhead.