Red Lake Peak

We toured up Red Lake peak today. At the trailhead at 7400' there was 20cms on new snow on the ground. This snow was soft and unconsolidated. As we moved up the road below tree line winds were calm not producing much movement of snow. Once at the lake the winds picked up and snow was being transported for the rest of tour. Overcast skies made for poor visibility through most of the morning but by early afternoon the ceiling level lifted and intermittent patches of sunshine broke through. Looking around the cirque during those periods of open skies no avalanches were observed within the area. We stopped to dig a pit at 8800' on a N aspect just above the lake and got propagating results within our ECT twice. The failure was occuring on the new/old snow interface at 30cms down.  As we climbed up above 9000' winds become more previlant and snow was transporting onto Easterly aspects. The wind was also forming sustrugi, wind textured snow and scouring the exposed ridgelines. The ride down was a mix of wind affected snow, thin breakable wind slab and powder conditions that made for mostly enjoyable riding. Ski cuts and turns did not produce any signs of instability but we kept our slope angle mellow.

We dug a pit at 8800' on a North aspect, HS was 270, and there was 30cms on new snow on top. We dug down 120cms and the snowpack is rightside up. On our compression test we got some planar results on the new/old snow interface and so we moved on to the ECT and got propagating results on this layer within two tests. This was the only layer that produced any results within both tests.