Rapidly increasing S/SE winds in afternoon
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Magnum
We toured up to 3100ft on Magnum to ski the northern face.
Observer Comments
Weather
Calm and sunny until we reached upper elevation northern aspects where east/southeast ridge top winds were rising in the afternoon to about 15g25 and still rising when we dropped back down.
Snow surface
Low elevation surface crust was melting by 11am, but quickly transitioned to supportable by 1500ft. Ski pen on N aspects above 2500ft about 15cm.
Snowpack
We dug a pit at 3000ft on the north aspect of Magnum with following results:
HS > 300cm
CT13Q2 at 30cm and CT20Q2 at 55cm down.
First ECT: ECTN20 at 20cm down and a slight fracture on overdrive taps at 55cm, which could have been partially due to column collapsing.
Second ECT: ECTN22 at 20cm down and ECTN24 at 30cm.
A shovel shear also showed a weak layer of facets 55cm down.
We haven’t been out enough recently to know if the weak layers at 20 and 30cm down were from same storm (maybe wind created 2 interfaces?)
We skied the slope (max angle around 38°) with no additional signs of instability.
Remaining ECT block after second test. ECTN22 and ECTN24 after shovel shearing off layers that failed.
CT column after CT13 and CT20 showing faceted weak layer at 55cm down