Castle Peak

We toured up to the top of the NW trees on Castle Peak today and over the N side of the Castle/Basin Ridge assessing post storm snowpack change and evaluating the snowpack for persistent slab issues. We did not find signs of current instability, but that was also not particularly confidence inspiring as a decreasing trend in persistent slab reactivity has caught some of the best avalanche professionals off guard over the years. We have medium confidence that we saw the crown of a natural persistent slab avalanche that most likely occurred back on Dec 19. I wish I could have been able to get a view of the runout zone to better verify the presence or absence of debris, but the terrain obscured the view.

We dug two snowpits in this area. Both had wet facets at the bottom of the snowpack (wet from vapor in the pack, not from rain percolation). Both pits had very similar layering. The main difference being that the basal facets in the second test pit were slightly less hard at 4F as compared to 4F+ in the full profile pit.  We did not get any unstable test results in either snowpit. Full pit profile is from a NW aspect at 8,850'. The test pit was at the location in the screenshot, ENE aspect at 8,700'. In the test pit we got results of ECTX and PST 115/120 end on facets 5 cm above ground level.

Surface snow was wet on all aspects up to about 8,200 to 8,300', especially on the foggy E side of the Sierra Crest where we triggered some minor roller ball activity.