Recent Avalanches? | No |
Collapsing (Whumphing)? | No |
Cracking (Shooting cracks)? | Yes |
Skied Eddies, sticking to lower angle terrain near the ridgeline. Normal skin track up and stayed fairly close to the skin track on the way down, skiing the meadows just skier’s left on the sub-ridge.
Recent Avalanches? | No |
Collapsing (Whumphing)? | No |
Cracking (Shooting cracks)? | Yes |
We planned to stick to conservative terrain today, and as we left the alder-line below the meadows we had a couple of small collapses of the crust underneath the new snow. It felt like breakable crust with about 6in of light fluffy snow on top. When the crust collapsed through we did get some small shooting crack in places where the snow was more wind affected (nothing further than 3' down low). Higher up on the ridge we did find some pockets of wind affected snow that was starting to turn into small wind slabs. I stomped a couple of these and got shooting cracks up to about 15' in front of my ski. Some of these pockets also moved a little for me but we were in low angle terrain so they could not go far. It seemed that the reactive layer was just the new snow where it was wind affected, and it was failing at the bottom of the new snow or the old/new snow interface, so only 6"-8" deep.
It was around 32 degrees at the trailhead, and 25 up on the ridge. Mostly clear with a few scattered clouds. Winds were mostly calm and occasionally gusting to light higher up.
Down low we found about 6" of new snow on crust. Higher up was new snow on various crust/wind/soft snow with some pockets of soft, sensitive wind loaded snow.
We dug a snow pit at 2000' on a NW facing slope that had been slightly wind loaded. We found a thick crust 103cm down with a 3cm facet layer on top. With our ECT test that facet/crust combo was unreactive today, but was still a layer of concern. Our only result was ECTN4, 22cm down from the new snow starting to wind slab up and not fully bonding to the old interface. Snowpit profile is attached.