Sunny skies with mild temps and light northerly winds that added a chill. Winds were strong enough to blow quite a bit of snow around up at ridgelines.
Observation: Girdwood
Location: Crow Creek
We went for a low-angle sightseeing tour up Crow Creek to take a look at conditions and enjoy the sun. We toured up to 4900′ and dug a pit on a northwest slope at just under 3000′. We found a similar snowpack to what we’ve been looking at around the advisory area, with a shallower (2′ deep) slab sitting on top of the 3/14 facet layer. We’re still operating with very little info from this area.
Weather
Snow surface
We traveled across a variety of snow surfaces, with a trace to 3" low-density snow on top. Most slopes had a supportable crust just under the newest snow from wednesday night, but some of the high shaded slopes were spared from the crust. Steep solar aspects were getting warm enough by about 2:30 p.m. to start seeing rollerballs and rocks falling down steep slopes. We saw one long-running loose snow avalanche on a SW aspect that happened around 4:00 p.m.
Snowpack
The snowpack in this area showed a lot of similarity to the rest of the advisory area. Specifically, there is a hard slab sitting on top of a layer of facets. The two big differences were (1) the slab is about half as deep in Crow Creek as it is in the pass, and (2) the weak layer doesn't seem to be quite as weak. It is really important to note that we only dug one pit, so I am really hesitant to draw any broad conclusions. It is quite possible that we could have dug just around the corner and found a different setup.
See attached photos and video for more snowpack info.
Snow was blowing off the ridgelines for most of the day, with the most transport mid-morning and later in the afternoon. 04.01.2023
The only fresh looking slab avalanches we saw were these two small wind slabs at around 5000' on a west aspect. 04.01.2023
Snowpit at 2950' on a WNW aspect. 04.01.2023
Detailed snowpack info from our snowpit. 04.01.2023