Quick report
Our avalanche course got to enjoy wintery conditions today, with snow falling and the wind blowing. To fulfill our learning objective of introducing snow pits, we chose a small clearing to the lookers' left (east) of the bottom of Hillman's Highway, near the tree line, at 4,000'. We observed a total snow depth of about 60cm, with 10cm of fist-hard new snow atop layers of pencil-hard refrozen old snow. One layer of 4-finger wet facets was observed down 25cm, in the old snow. We practiced compression tests, which resulted in resistant fractures in basal facets during hard taps from the shoulder. One compression test showed a resistant fracture down 25cm in the wet facets. These results were in line with our other observations, such as hand shear tests and probing with ski poles. Wind and snowfall were moderate.