Castle Peak

The wind felt cold and strong when we stepped out of the truck on Donner Summit, but the sun still poked through the gathering clouds. We experienced a variety of snow surfaces during our tour including breakable crusts, supportable crusts, and some areas of soft snow on northerly-facing aspects in the trees. The winds increased as we climbed higher and scoured the snow surfaces near the ridge. They blew snow over the ridges and started building new wind slabs and adding to the existing cornices. We stayed on the downhill side of exposed rocks while near the ridge to make sure our feet stayed on solid ground. On the way back down, we ski-cut some smaller wind-loaded test slopes but did not trigger any cracking or other signs of instability despite about 3 inches of accumulated wind-blown snow. It seemed like the storm started a little earlier than expected today (see the weather section for details).