Mostly cloudy with upper ridgelines obscured by clouds. Winds were light and we did not see any active snow transport where we were, but the visibility made it hard to see the adjacent ridgelines. Temperatures were warm, but with the clouds blocking the sun it felt less intense than earlier this week.
Observation: Turnagain
Location: Tincan Common
Normal uptrack to base of Tincan Common. Stopped to look at the snowpack at 2500′ on a SW aspect and 2900′ on a NW aspect.
Weather
Snow surface
Mix of supportable crust on southern aspects, breakable crust, and dry snow on northern aspects. We did not see any active wind transport on Tincan, but we avoided the upper ridgeline of Tincan Common due to poor visibility.
Snowpack
We dug two sets of snowpits to look at the surface structure. The first on a southwest aspect at 2500' had two stout 5-10 cm thick melt freeze crusts in the upper 50 cm. We did not find any obvious weak layers or have propagating results in our ECT. At 2900' on a NW aspect we were able to find the 4/1 surface hoar layer and had a sudden collapse on a compression test with 18 taps. This layer was buried about 40 cm down from the surface where we dug.
We saw some more smaller glide released on the northern end of Seattle ridge but were not sure if they were fresh or not.
A few period of decent visibility today, we didn't see any obvious wind transport on Sunburst but only had a view of it for part of the day.
First pit at 2500' on a SW aspect, with two stout melt freeze cursts in the upper 50 cm and no significant instability test results.
Second pit at 2900' on NW aspect, this one had a layer of buried surface hoar from 4.1.22 which is indicated with a line drawn in the snow, CT 18 Sudden Collapse.
Bronté and Declan taking a look at the buried surface hoar grains.