Quick report
- Collapsing
- isolated
There is a good bit of loose snow sitting around at upper elevations. Makes for good skiing and would be good ammo for a wind slab problem or a loose snow problem. I visited a portion of the crown of the large natural avalanche south of the hairpin at/near the summit of the pass. This avalanche buried somewhat recent tracks in the "exit gully" below. This avalanche failed 80-85cm down on a layer of small facets (0.5-1.5mm mostly, a few to 2mm), which is sandwiched between crusts. The crust above these facets (which failed as part of the slab) was clearly a degrading rain crusts. There was a matrix of 3-4 crusts with intercalated facets on this E facing slope at 9,150' (in places I could convince myself there were 5 crusts here...its a bit of a mess). The slab graded from F- to 1F, nearly half of the lower slab was 1F. I experienced 2 or 3 muffled collapses while traveling along a wind affected ridgeline. These did not travel far and seemed to involve on the stiff drifts capping the ridge. I currently have no interest in entering sizable avalanche terrain with a snowpack that looks like this.
Weather
Clearing skies. Pockets of scrappy mid level stratocumulus giving the sunset a surface to paint on. Beautiful evening.
Snowpack
Small crop of surface hoar formed at the snow surface. Amount of new snow available for transport and available for surficial loose snow problems increases significantly above the rain/wet snow/schmoo line around roughly 8,250'.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2.5
- Count
- 4
- Aspect
- N
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 9600 ft
There was a round of small solar initiated loose snow activity in the Boulders yesterday (see photo). I did not enter these in database as they were D1 in size.