12 Mar 09, Mt. Rainier, Nisqually Glacier Avalanch

About 11 a.m., biggest I've ever seen in person, all those billowing boiling clouds of snow and big roar ...

Did you get any photos? Where on the Nisqually did it start? Any more information?

Thanks.

Did you get any photos?  Where on the Nisqually did it start?  Any more information?

Thanks.

I hope someone else has definitive info; no photos. I skinned up from 4 xing to Paradise River then up Edith Basin Ridge to about the elevation of golden gate when I heard the roar. Looked up and saw the avalanche starting to build. It started "high up", I don't know, 1,000-1,500 ft below the summit? Seemed to have a "point" release maybe a serac fall or some other ice fall. It spread out covering what seemed to be most of the glacier, building rapidly with the blast wave producing large clouds. It went below the horizon line from my point view well before it ended.

Driving down Glacier Hill this evening, it looked to have started from Nisqually Icefall west of Gibralter, and ran almost to the Wilson crossing/Fan entrance on the west side of the glacier

As a kid, I still have this memory stuck in my head. We were climbing up the muir snowfields. We kids usually ran ahead and around on our way to muir. Out in front of me was a line of other hiker, skier, climbers, so it must have been early spring. High up on the glacier a massive avalanche broke off the Nisqually and came barreling down the mountain. The plum was so massive that everyone on the snowfields began to run as it looked like it may come up on the snowfields. It didn't of course, but I remember that moment of "whoa!". To this day, one of the coolest things I've seen, next to a billion butterflys I saw on the summit of adams once (since then usually only see a few hundred here and there).

Here are some photos that I took during my trip up to Muir ( see TR ). Unfortunately, I never saw or even heard (!) the avalanche because I was skinning up Pan Face and around the back side of Pan Point at the time. I'm guessing it occurred around 11:30am, since a photo taken at 11:18am shows no sign of it, while the photos below were taken at 11:48am from around 7000 ft just above Pan Point. It looks like the starting point was around 11000 ft and it ran down to about 6500 ft, for a path length of about 2 miles. I wonder how deep the debris field is . . .


Here is the 3648x2736, 3.5MB full-size version of the photo above.


Zoomed shot of Nisqually Icefall, the avalanche-scoured area is at left. And the 3648x2736, 4.1MB full-size version

I shot some video of a much smaller, but still fairly large, serac-fall from Nisqually Ice Cliff (or perhaps from the edge of Nisqually Icefall?) at 1:52pm. By the time I pulled the camera out, it was just a billowing cloud of snow: 15 sec, 22.8MB .mov file

From Stefan Lofgren, NPS, Mt. R Climbing blog:

On the way up, I saw one of the largest ice-avalanches from Nisqually Ice Fall that I have ever seen. It went clear from about 11,200 feet to about 6,300 on the Nisqually. Amazing white powder cloud. It's an obvious good thing to remember that we're not "safe" from ice fall hazard on the lower Nisqually.