Light east winds gusting to moderate with short bouts of light snowfall. Overcast skies but warm temps creating a longwave/greenhouse effect that was helping to melt the snow in the mid elevations.
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Seattle Ridge
Took the snowmachine up to the Repeat Offender slide path above the common motorized up-track to fill in an information gap we had in our forecast area. We dug a pit to assess the snowpack structure around the 3.14.23 interface, considering we have not seen any activity on this aspect. This is the interface that created a bunch of really big avalanches during the end of March and is our current Deep Persistent Slab problem.
Weather
Snow surface
About an inch of fluffy light snow on top of sun crust. The slope had a supportable sun crust and it was possible to link turns until the crust warmed up enough to be breakable at about 1500'.
Snowpack
We dug down to our layer of concern, the 3.14 crust/ facet combo buried 2.5' deep under a hard slab. This was a scoured area so the slab is thinner than many other areas. Under this slab, was a knife hard melt/freeze crust that was around 4" thick. The top of the crust seemed to have bonded well to the settled storm snow. Below this crust we found a thin layer of rounding facets that sat on top of a stronger faceted layer (pencil hard, around 1mm rounding facets). This snowpit did not have any alarming layers of weak faceted snow, which is much different than other areas. In other areas we have seen weak facets surrounding the melt-freeze crust or on shaded aspects, just facets without a crust under the March storm snow that is now a hard slab. Our stability test produced no results.
We dug about a ft below the 3.14 crust and looked closely at the snow structure surrounding the melt-freeze crusts through the snowpack.
Crusty but supportable turns, surprisingly smooth and fun!
Good views of Turnagain pass on an overcast day.