East Seeley Lake

The difference in conditions between lower and upper elevations was dramatic. Conditions were spring-like at lower elevations with moist, cohesionless snow. At upper elevations, snow was cold, dry and wind affected in many areas, although it had previous been warmed by the high pressure weather we've been experiencing. The persistent slab problem was apparent by lots of cracking, collasping, recent avalanches observed, and propagation in our snowpit. All of the avalanches observed were on south and southwest aspects, leading us to believe they may have been triggered by loose wet snow activity at the surface.

The collapsing was more specific to middle elevations. We observed cracking just about everywhere. We observed numerous avalanches and wet snow release that likely all happened within the recent days of warm weather.

At lower elevations, conditions were springlike. The snow was moist and lost a lot of cohesion. The average depth of snow was around 1 foot.

At middle elevations, the average depth was 2-3 feet and the snow began to cool down around 7300'. However, we observed signs of previous warming and wetting of snow on south aspects all the way up to ridgeline.

We dug a snowpit on a west aspct around 7500'. The depth of this pit was 40" (103cm). In this pit we found a slab of consolidated snow sitting on top of weak, faceted snow at the ground. We performed an extended column test that broke within the slab at tap #23 in some broken buried surface hoar and then propagated on the layer of facets on tap #24.