Lost Lake

We went to lost lake to see if we could still find any cold snow that was unaffected by the temperatures earlier in the week. The road was frozen the entire approach, it was hard to keep the machines cool. The frozen tracks from the past couple weeks made for challenging riding coniditons. It was a rough and bouncy journey.  Good cold snow turns were far and few between. Snow surfaces remained frozen from the light north winds. There was a widespread breakable crust from sun exposure and high temps. Today felt like the end of the warm spell. We did not see any signs of instability within our pit, with non-formal obs or while riding.  No corn or surface melt was observed today. Ghost tracks facing south are starting to form "penetentes".  

Cold, ridable snow exists in the alpine on north aspects.  Getting to and from it is the hard part.  Building a skin track is difficult due to the weak snow structure. The snow collapses under your feet and doesn't provide any purchase on steeper terrain. 

No signs of instatbility.

We dug a quick pit. On north ascpets, there is 5-15cm of soft surface snow Near Tree Line and Above Tree Line.  This soft snow is the result of near surface facets that are still cold in the alpine.  The snowpack quickly goes from a fist soft surface to 1 Finger/ Pencil hard snow. The HS was 200-300cm, the rain crust was 66cm down.  CTs showed only weakness within the rotten surface snow.  We found 5-20cm windboard under some NFS.

Treed areas specifically have a breakable melt freeze crust.  There is a widespread crust ranging in thickness depending on the amount of sun, timing of sun, and amount of trees. 

Southern aspects did not show signs of surface melt today.  The light north winds kept the snow frozen on all aspects.