Clear, sunny, but not as warm as previous few days
Observation: Summit
Location: Mills Creek
From lower Summit Lake to NW shoulder above Mills creek.
Weather
Snow surface
Melt-freeze crust on most aspects, SE-W, even a little on NW.
Facets everywhere else.
Snowpack
Pulled out a layer of large intact buried surface hoar on a hand pit 30 cm down on a NW aspect at 2140'. Dug a pit about 2200', found that same BSH layer 40 cm down, one more BSH layer about 20 cm below that and a faceted layer another 10 cm below that. HS was 120cm.
Basal facets were visible but fairly well bonded. Got ECTN 40cm down on that first BSH layer. The entire column popped out pretty fast when I pried on the column to clean it up, so we did another test and got ECTX. However, the crystals were large and intact. We were also able to pry the second BSH layer out which stepped to the facet layer below. In the photo, both the top blue marker and the red marker are the BSH.
Pit wall BSH hoar at 80 and 61. HS 120
BSH in the pit wall
Heather showing off some large Surface hoar crystals
Surface hoar in our hand shear