Avalanche danger across Northwest Montana is getting increasingly dicey, with the Glacier Country Avalanche Center rating the hazard as “high” between 5,000 and 6,000 feet.

“Very dangerous avalanche conditions exist,” the Friday advisory states. “Travel in avalanche terrain is not recommended. Natural avalanches are likely; human-triggered avalanches are very likely.”

Ted Steiner, an avalanche safety consultant for BNSF Railway, found that out firsthand on Wednesday during a monitoring patrol on Snowslip Mountain in Glacier National Park.

Steiner was skiing on a safe route to a higher-elevation site he commonly uses to test snowpack stability. He was on flat ground above a known avalanche-prone slope when the snow collapsed under him, triggering a slide about 40 feet away.

“I would estimate it started at about 5,900 feet and it ran to about 5,600 feet elevation, so about 400 vertical feet,” said Steiner, who works for the Alaska-based firm Chugach Adventure Guides.

What was most notable about the slide, which was about 250 feet wide, was that it was 3 to 5 feet deep at the crown, basically encompassing all the layers of precipitation that have collected over the winter.

“We’re not dealing with newly fallen snow,” Steiner said. “We’re dealing with deep-slab instabilities in some places.”

There has been a series of recent moderate slides in the Middle Fork Flathead River corridor, he said.

“We’re having moderate natural avalanche activity. We haven’t had anything running full-path to the canyon floor yet,” he said, but that could change with continued rain at lower elevations and snow at higher elevations forecast over the next few days.

“Our starting zones are actively loading now with newly fallen snow and wind-deposited snow,” he said. “We’re definitely looking at the potential for natural avalanche activity and as the storm cycle continues the potential for that increases.”

Those conditions exist at higher elevations pretty much across the entire northwestern part of the state, mainly because of weather cycles following extremely cold weather patterns, according to Tony Willits, a snow and avalanche specialist with the Flathead National Forest.

“We have an upside-down snowpack right now,” Willits said. “It’s upside-down because we have more warm, dense snow overlying cold, less-dense snow. That creates stress on those weaker layers.”

In addition to slide reports in the Middle Fork corridor, there have also been recent reports of natural avalanches in the Lost Johnny area west of Hungry Horse Reservoir.

An avalanche in the nearby Beta Road area on Jan. 8 buried three snowmobilers. Two managed to be extracted safely, but the third, West Glacier resident Bruce Jungnitsch, died in the slide.

Another avalanche that same day in the Lost Johnny drainage caught two other snowmobilers, but they escaped any harm.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.