Quick report
- Aspect
- Northeast
- Red Flags
- Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 2987 m
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Much of this area avalanched during all the snow early January. This has left a relatively thin snow pack that is a mix of old crusts and facets. You could see large debris piles and crowns on most alpine aspects.</p>
Old crowns in the back, sastrugi in the front.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Not exactly slide for life conditions per se but the variability in the snow required some caution both descending and ascending.</p>
We encountered almost every type of snow except powder. Most of the snow surface was a combination of windboard over facets or older wind blown snow over facets. South aspects could have softened although we were on those aspects early in the day and didn't observe that first hand.
The old wind blown snow over facets doesn't really come across on the snow profile below. This made skinning and skiing pretty tricky and variable. Often you'd find pretty different snow surfaces over a very short distance.
This area experienced strong winds earlier in the week which also formed sastrugi (see photo below).
In some places, we found quite large facets (~1cm) growing below the windboard. It almost looked like stalactites.
All of this is pretty concerning for the next time it (hopefully) snows.