Burke Summit

Pretty quiet conditions in the mountains - except for the loud noise from ski pressure thanks to the egg shell rain crust on the surface. The snowpack as a whole has improved a lot recently and layers near the surface show evidence of improved bonding. A couple weaker interfaces reside in the top meter of the snowpack, but they will take finding the isolated shallow spot or a very large trigger to fail.

We found the elusive January 2 surface hoar on a northeast-facing slope near Burke Summit around 6,495 feet. Rain on January 3 had wetted this layer but the grains still had some visual morphology. This layer was around 60 cm deep below a right-side-up slab and the grains were on the lower portion of a decomposing crust. Compression Tests produced resitant planar failures with mod-hard force in the surface hoar. ECTs did not propagate initially and the crack arrested at the edge of the shovel. A shovel pry behind the column helped extend the crack across the rest of the block. We did not observe test results at the Grinch crust - now buried close to a meter deep in our pit location. Today's warmup did not have the same effect to surface wetting as the day prior and Monday's light rain. Visible rollerballs looked a day old and previous days wetting followed by a decent surface refreeze overnight likely took the edge off wet snow hazards. Sunny, wind-sheltered slopes did soften nicely by the afternoon but we were unsucessful at initiating wet snow sluffing with ski pressure. Shady aspects/ areas still had a frozen surface around 1 pm.