Snow Lake Divide

It was a bit of a scramble this morning after putting out an update and then scrapping my original plan for the day. I made a rocket trip to the Divide to take a look at how the storm was panning out. Not a lot of people out and about, but most of them were familiar faces.

Temperatures flirted with 32 all morning and it felt like it might switch to rain at any moment. But it stayed snow up until I left the field around 1:00pm. The visibility was difficult. Breaking trail from Source Lake up to the Divide, I was basically in the snow globe. Surface roughness from the weekend helped light my way. 

Although it was snowing all day, I was soaked. The snow got progressively wetter throughout my time and you could tell underfoot. Handpits started to fail more easily as the snowpack became upside-down. I even had a few fail on isolation. On steep or unsupported features, 6" crowns were easy to spot or trigger.

Exiting the field, the wet avalanche issues started to reveal themselves even though it was still snowing. There was some debris coming off the cliffs near Mushroom. The snow continued to get heavier as I approached the parking lot. Driving out the Alp road, I witnessed a roofalanche, active pinwheels and rollerballs, and spotted a small slab that had ripped out due to a loose avalanche. Driving west on i90, larger debris piles were spotted from the bridge. By the time I hit the Denny Creek exit, it was full on pouring rain.

Areas of cracking observed on uptrack tests and on wind-loaded test features. Plenty of small avalanches observed.

I measured 12-16cm of new snow during my travels up to the Divide on Monday morning. It was a bit moist right at the parking lot but overall was much less dense than I had anticipiated. Multiple hand pits showed a sensitive layer down roughly 15 cm and the snow was upside down. In places, this was hard to discern since it was so soft.

Digging on the Divide to look at the upper snowpack, I got tilt tests to fail on the 1/20 (the layer down 15cm). Compression tests failed at this layer (CT8) and on a few other storm instabilities. 

The 1/20 was more of a storm interface in most locations I traveled, but it was a zipper crust on the N side of the divide.

I did not get failures on 1/16 (down 45cm) or 1/8 (down 80cm) during compression tests or an extended column test.

I did not perform tests on the Solstice Crust today, but it was down 133cm.