Paradise Area

Sometimes it's nice to cover basically the same terrain one week later. It lets us truly track how the snowpack is changing over time. The short answer is, it's even more locked up than it was a week ago. Surfaces today struggled to soften due to the high thin clouds and light N to NE breeze. The snowpack is hanging on, but it's definitely showing the impacts of nearly two weeks of warm sunny weather. It looks a lot more like June than late January. The amount of trail walking for this time of year was impressive. I guess, if it's not going to snow, might as well be nice. 

 

No signs of instability.

Overall, the snowpack is strong. If you really want to dive into differences, it mostly breaks on a shaded, non-shaded split. 

Southerly (sunny) aspects: A very strong melt freeze crust was found on all sunny slopes. In most places it was too strong and too thick to measure. This brick of a layer will likely serve as new ground on thses slope going forward. Today, most slopes struggled to soften much at all. Only the steepest (~40 degrees) southerly slopes turned to spring snow. Slightly less steep (~35 degree) slopes stayed firm and solid. It was a lesson in slope angle effects on sun impact. 

High thin clouds to the south resulted in a bit of filtered sunshine. This, combined with a light N breeze, made it even harder for the snow to soften. 

Northerly: Variable is the name of the game on shaded aspects. In some places, the surface crust was very thin and breakable. In others, it was stout and solid. While we could find weak snow (facets) in the snowpack in shaded terrain, this variability made it tricky for any snowpack test to provide consistent results. Weak 1mm facets were found just below the surface crust and above another thin icy/melt-freeze crust. These persistent grains were not an issue today, but are worth noting for down the road.