Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading, Rapid Warming
Wind-texturing and significant scouring on NW facing terriain in the alpine.
Wet loose activity prevalent all aspects in steeper terrain below ~8500'
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Wet loose activity observed throughout the afternoon on lower elevation slopes of all aspects. Below 8500' in N-facing Coalpit outruns, many natural small releases of golfball-to-softball sized debris pieces in steep terrain.</p> <p>Much of the alpine snow is wind-affected from the last week's significant W and NW winds. Today's wind from the S had moderate gusts on ridgelines but there is little available for transport. Cornices and drifts are common on the East aspects and other aspects have been scoured and textured. Despite this, we saw no evidence of wind slab activity through 4 drainages and could not find any of this last storm's wind slab that had a weak interface or significant propagation potential.</p>
Varying snow conditions due to wind from last Thursday/Friday and solar effects from Saturday PM through today. Much of the alpine terrain shows evidence of scouring, wind-loading, or general texturing. Though Friday's high winds in upper LCC accompanied the 1.5-2' of snow that fell with high PI, the instabilities in the wind-affected snow are isolated to steep/rocky lee areas and to ridgeline cornices (Av Problem #2).
The weekend's sun caused small roller ball releases on many solar aspects but today's greenhousing increased wet-loose activity on all lower-elevation terrain (increasingly through mid-afternoon).