Quick report
- Aspect
- Northwest
- Red Flags
- Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 3109 m
- Slope Angle
- 24°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>We had 2 large collapses on our tour today. One was near the top of the ridge around 10'000 feet in an open northwest facing glade and the other was on the last climb before the summit of Noriega's. We also found facets in the old snow when we dug a pit. See the pit profile for more details</p>
We dug our pit at 10,200 feet on a northwest-facing slope. We did an extended column test and got a ECTP26 at the interface of the Christmas storm and the old snow from. The column failed on a layer small facets with some graupel. this is the same layer that we had a failure on 2 days ago.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>The new snow from yesterday appeared to have bonded well with the snow from the Christmas eve storm, however with the low density of the snow and increasing winds in the forecast I would expect things to get a little more interesting over the next couple of days.</p> <p>There is a weak layer at the new old snow interface that has failed in both pits we have dug in the past week. We also noticed faceting in the old snow. If we start seeing a lot of wind loading in the next few days I could see this weak layer becoming more active.</p>
The snow that fell yesterday was very low density and made for some great powder turns. Even up on the ridge line we found good low density powder that had not been affected by the wind.