Light sluffing of new ~14" snow in steeper northern run.
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Sunburst
Toured up the standard Sunburst route for a few runs in the fresh snow. Skied one run on the south side and one on the north. Seemed like ~18-20″ of new light and fluffy snow from the parking lot to the ridge. It didn’t seem like the snow had taken wind and was exceptional skiing.
Observer Comments
Weather
18-20" new, low density snow. Mid-high teens with calm winds throughout the day. Slight breeze on the ridge had some bite to it if you stood around too long.
Snow surface
The deep new snow provided high quality skiing, and palatable skinning with how light density it was. Didn't observe any winded snow, or fresh crowns/debris from the most recent storm in our travels.
The North run we skied was less bottomless than the south side. It seemed as though the new light density snow was sitting on top of smaller piles of debris from some natural cycling from the 12/10 storm.
Snowpack
Dug a quick pit on SW aspect at 2300'. HS 150cm. New Snow ~30cm. Largely a right side up snowpack in the top 100cm. Fist to 4f to 1f in the top meter of snow. Thanksgiving crust sat at about 100cm down with smaller facets on top and larger facets underneath. Below the crust/facet interface was 1f to 4f with moist snow sitting on the ground.
Test results were better than expected. CT12 @ 40cm down, and CT 24 @ 55cm down on Crust interface. ~Q2 on the crust layer. Crust was roughly 3cm thick with a pretty solid melt freeze look to it.
ECTN 22 @40cm down with no results on the Thanksgiving Crust in this pit location.
IMG_6941 Large
IMG_6948 Large
IMG_6938 Large
IMG_6947 Large