Observation: Turnagain

Somewhat sunny in the morning with increasing clouds in the afternoon. There was a light breeze out of the south to southwest most of the day. Below freezing at the trailhead when we started, but up to 35 when we left.

There was a breakable crust of variable thickness depending on aspect, up to around 2200'. Above that only south aspects had much of a crust. There was about an inch of new of new snow on top of the crusts in most places in the morning. The snow surface higher remained fairly supportable (6-8 inches ski penetration in most places).

We observed multiple dry loose avalanches on northerly aspects from yesterday that looked to be point releases running from rocks. These seemed to have likely ran yesterday afternoon when the sun came out for a bit. Southerly aspects had more avalanche activity with lots of wet loose releases, many of which looked to be caused by cornice fall. We were also guessing that those ran yesterday afternoon with the sun. A couple of the wet loose slides pulled out larger pockets mid-slope. That side of the bowl looked to be cross loaded in places, and it appeared that the wet loose were pulling out those small wind slabs when they encountered them. We did not witness any avalanche activity that occurred during the day today.

We dug a quick pit at 3000' on a NW aspect. Total height of snow was around 400cm and we dug down 130cm. We had two layers that we identified as potential weak layers, one 35cm down and one 65cm down. Both layers were about 5cm thick and had 4F density below 1F. Below that the density steadily increased from 1F to P at the bottom of our pit. With a shovel shear test we found that the column pulled out easily at both of our layers of concern. However our only ECT result was ECTN26 35cm down.