Observation: Turnagain

Location: Lynx Drainage

Date:
Observer:
Route & General Observations

Rode up into Lynx Creek near Johnson Pass on snowmachines to gather observations for CNFAIC. Overall poor riding conditions. Most everything was tracked out or had varying levels of wind effect/wind slab.

Red Flags
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Observer Comments

No obvious signs of instability

Weather & Snow Characteristics
Please provide details to help us determine the weather and snowpack during the time this observation took place.
Weather

Significant inversion, -12F at the trail-head likely mid 20s up at ~2500ft. Calm, no wind, clear skies

Snow surface

Surface snow is heavily wind effected with surface slabs/crusts ranging from 1cm to 20+cm. These had little to no energy but small chunks would slide off easily into snow pit once broken off.

New surface hoar existed at lower creek bottom elevations - below 1,500', but did no surface hoar found at the higher elevations.

Snowpack

As with other areas in the Pass, we saw poor structure here as well. Total depths were 125cm to 75cm. The top layer was knife hard wind slab with highly variable thickness even within our pit (1cm - 20cm). Below the wind slab was a layer ~30cm thick of small grained faceted snow (the Christmas storm snow). This layer is sitting on another 30-40cm thick layer of small grained facets which sits on top of a 10-15cm ice crust / rounding facets combo that continued to the ground.

Our pit yielded an ECTN23 RP under the wind slab, ~15cm down and ECTN27 RP below the Christmas snow at ~45cm down.

Photos & Video
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