Weather
It was a relatively warm day compared to last week. Overcast skies, light snow throughout the day, and light winds out of the north made it pleasant.
Snowpack
Regardless of where we traveled, we found a widespread weak layer buried about a foot below the surface. It didn’t look like there was a new persistent weak layer in the upper snowpack, but most places we dug today had about eight to twelve inches of new snow, which was very light. We dug on an east-facing slope around 10,000 ft and found new snow that was not cohesive enough to form a slab on top of weak snow that was likely formed in early January, as this slope likely didn’t have much snow on it before then. Our Extended Column Test did not produce any propagating and crumbled away as the snow was so weak. We additionally found similar results on a north-facing slope around 11,400ft where I had dug the previous month. The only propagating ECT result we got today was on a southeast-facing slope below treeline with two taps from the shoulder around a facet/crust combination. We’ll have to keep an eye on this as we continue to get more snow and add a thicker slab on top of these weak layers.
Avalanche
We saw evidence of an old avalanche that was probably over a week old.