Quick report
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>There was snowpack reactivity, but it was difficult to be too alarmed by it. Found generally mediocre bonding between the soft snow and underlying crust. This led to loose/semi-cohesive avalanching underfoot on test slopes of at least 35 degrees, with increasing angle directly related to ease of sending the snow downhill. Wind affected snow was more cohesive and cracked into small blocks, but no shooting cracks, collapsing, etc. This seemed to match the Meisenheimer obs for 20250117, though I found few hints of faceting at the lower elevations we were in today, limited instead to protected, shady terrain above 7000ft with small facets on the crust surface--isolated to say the least. Otherwise, the usual D1 point releases in steep solar terrain, some running relatively long at 500-600ft of vert.</p>
One of the longer running point releases in the southeasterly terrain on Island Peak (lower center of photo).
Snowpack
Low to mid elevations picked up about 2" of new snow, perhaps 3", before it was all done by mid morning. At lower elevations and/or in the sun, there was 4-5 additional inches of damp soft-ish snow atop the old crust. In protected terrain, the snow was much better preserved and lower density, making for good dust-on-crust turns. The warm temps mid-week, followed by the wind, plus a bit of snow did a surprisingly good job at filling in old tracks. Things weren't exactly fresh, but much more filled in than I'd anticipated. The aforementioned winds overnight reached as low as 6500ft or so, leaving the evidence of their passage with soft wind lips and cakey snow, with more pronounced wind effects with increasing elevation.