| Recent Avalanches? | No |
| Collapsing (Whumphing)? | Yes |
| Cracking (Shooting cracks)? | No |
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Eddies
Toured solo to Eddies to check on snow conditions. First ski day of this season.
Generally pretty damp and warm. Had to stop twice to wax/scrape my skins due to massive snow clumping.
The top few hundred feet of the run skied surprisingly well.
Obvious signs of instability
Observer Comments
When I skinned over to far skiers' left at 2,200' , due west aspect looking towards Tincan, there were several small/local whumphs.
Weather
33F at the road. Barely below freezing at 2,000ft.
Clouds/Fog from road level up to 1,500ft-2,000ft elevation band. High clouds above that, bright but flat light.
Snowing lightly within the clouds. Despite active snowfall, there was still net negative snow at the road: lost about 1cm in a few hours.
Snow surface
Looked like it rained below ~1,500' elevation and saturated the top several cm's of the snowpack, didn't soak all the way through.
From 1,500'-1,800' there was a few damp cm's of fresh snow on top of last week's settled snow. Also, widespread natural roller balls in this narrow elevation band. Lots of snow clumping on skins,.
Above 1,800' several cm's of fresh good snow on top of the highly wind distributed snow pack. Good skiing.
Snowpack
On the main NW ski zone below 2,200ft I general probed 65-90cm of snowpack, except where wind had scoured previous snow last week. I dug 2 pits.
Pit #1 was in the mellower tree run zone on skiers' right.
Elev 2,100'
30deg slope angle
NNW aspect
Snow depth 75cm
5-10cm of new fist hard snow on top of a generally uniform 4-finger snowpack. There was one layer of lower density snow at ~35cm down. This layer was reactive in CT. There were also basal facets that did not react in this pit.
Results:
CT 7 SP -20cm
CT 14 SP -35cm
CT 21 SC -35cm
ECTX (I was very surprised that the -35cm layer didn't react in ECT)
Shovel pry of the ECT block slid on the basal facets.
Pit #2 was on skiers' left of the main slope.
elev 2,100'
36deg slope
WNW aspect
Snow depth 80cm
5-10cm of new fist hard snow on top of a generally uniform 4-finger snowpack. The obvious density change layer seen in Pit #1 was not found in here. This pit did react at 20cm down, similar to the first pit, but I was not able to specifically identify this layer with density.
Results:
CT 10 SP -20cm
CT11 basal facet collapse
CT13 further planar slide at -20cm
ECT24 full width basal facet collapse, block stayed upright and intact.
Sharks in shallow water. Ridges and other wind scoured features had very thin and light cover, not enough to prevent bottoming out.
warm snow over cold snow = clumping on skins. Wax and a scraper helped.
Pit#1 density
Pit #2 the facets at the ground reacted to light pressure and propagated with a hefty intact slab above. Fortunately I didn't have plans to ski anything consequential, bc this pit would have canceled those plans.