Sunny and cold! -5 at the parking lot and around 15F along the ridge.
Almost no wind, a slight west breeze every once in a while on the ridge.
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Seattle Ridge
Quick ride up the common uptrack and down into the Seattle Ck drainage to check on conditions. Several glide cracks and some fairly recent glide avalanches were seen. Other than the whole snowpack slowly gliding down the slopes, there were no other signs of instability. Folks have put tracks on all types of steep terrain with no signs of triggering avalanches.
Weather
Snow surface
Variable snow surface.
Soft sugary (faceting) snow in sheltered areas. The old wind crusts are starting to soften with the cold clear weather.
Wind crusts and scoured areas make up most the higher elevations. However, some of this old wind affected snow is softening as well.
Surface hoar up to 2 inches in size found in creek bottoms and much smaller (2-6ish mm) on the ridge.
Snowpack
Although we did not dig a formal pit, we did cut around 4' deep into the snowpack and only found progressively harder snow with no easy shears. We could not find anything concerning in the pack.
Old glide avalanche (released evening of Jan 13) that ran over portions of the motorized uptrack.
Glide Cracks on the west of Seattle Ck
Close up on those glide cracks, note the impressive rumpling.
Dan Keeler in foreground and Andrew Schauer in background walking in the debris of an avalanche that likely released during the last storm cycle (Jan 7ish). Big thanks to AMDS and Ski-Doo / BRP for the Gen5 loaner snowmachine!
Views from the ridge, looking south toward Johnson Pass
Looking over Turnagain Pass at Eddies and Tincan ridges
Looking north over Warmup Bowl and toward Turnagain Arm.
Checking out the top few feet of the snowpack. 1 foot of soft snow over very stiff snow in this area.