Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
We did not observe any recent avalanches and few signs of instability. From the warmup last weekend, we could see old rollerballs in the NE shots west of Lakes Lookout and triggered some on our approach during the noon zap of sun. A PM cooling trend reduced this and dry loose was not entraining. Ski quality was good, not all time of course, but gentle turns on less-steep slopes kept you off the crust. Tomorrow should have good snow with this cooling trend. Isolated cracking in wind rolls near treeline, unable to produce avalanches on small test slopes. One panel of 5'x5' soft slab (F+) fractured but did not slide on a 35 degree concave feature (see photo)
Weather
- Air Temp
- 28F at 8300' 1400h
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- light
- Recent Snowfall
- 10-20
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Broken skies at the parking lot socked in by 1245h to overcast and S1 from 1300-1600h with 3cm of new afternoon snow over our skin track. Winds switched SW to N around 1300h also, but stayed light.
Snowpack
We found 8cm/ 3" of heavy, moist new snow at the ski area parking lot at 1130h, then up to 15cm/6" of slightly drier new snow near treeline. You could form a snowball with this surface snow, low or high. This sat above old wet grains up until around 7500', and higher than that was a very notable thin ice crust from 3/22. The new snow of yesterday and today bonded well to this crust and our only cracking, beyond small wind rolls on ridgeline, was a 10cm thick soft slab, 10cm above the crust. At 8300' NE, we found 292cm total height of snow, and the 2/26 buried surface hoar down 90cms. It appeared as a notable grey stripe but did not propagate in long column tests (ECTX, PST 100/100 dn 90 on 240226). It did fail with a shovel pry, revealing surface hoar grains 6-10mm. We also found non-propagating results down 15cm under the 3/22 melt freeze crust and down 32cm on a density change. Besides two non-reactive 1cm ice crusts and the 4F-hard buried surface hoar, the top 1 meter of the snowpack was right side up. It was a very similar in structure to Caleb's profile on 4/4/24 from 7600' in the Northern Wallowas.