Angell Basin

The winds that we experienced today were significantly less than what was forecasted which meant that the wind slabs were not as widespread or reactive as we expected them to be.  Although conditions where we traveled appeared generally stable today, there has clearly been a great deal of wind effect in the last week and I expect there to be a lot of variation in different pieces of terrain in terms of if there are weak layers in the snowpack, how deep they are, and how reactive they are. 

Once we got out of tree cover we saw a lot of wind-textured snow and could feel denser, wind-loaded areas as we traveled. We chose to dig in a particularly wind-loaded spot to try and get a sense of how deep and reactive the wind-slabs may be. Although the top 3 feet of the snowpack is right-side-up, while digging it was apparent that there were several layers of wind slabs from the last week that are in varying stages of bonding together. We did not get any propagating results in our Extended Column Test, however we did get a Sudden Collapse on our Column Test (CT22) about 1.5ft down. As we continued to poke around, we saw very clean shears on that layer, even though it was tough to trigger it.