Quick report
It’s giving cooking. Below the inversion, we saw road carnage with a collision that blocked a bridge and another car that had rolled. Yikes. Above it, it was hawt. Like, snow melting out of the trees hot. Take off your long johns while standing on the skinner hot. Brilliant sunshine and light winds confined to ridges meant that all solar surfaces (which had 1.5cm surface hoar) were wet to the touch. Didn’t see any local wet loose action but the attached avalanche observation on Great Northern appears to have run over 1000ft (sorry for the potato camera photo). On polar aspects, lighter density snow from our most recent storm was deposited atop a hard crust near the dirt. In places, wind had stiffened this, but distribution varies. We skied one lap on this, skinned up it to the shack, and called it a day. For what it’s worth, most of the skiing and skinning west of the ridgetop just isn’t deep enough to be much fun yet. You can ski more or less from the yurt on the road, but it gets slick and snowy before that.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Aspect
- SW
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 8000 ft
Observed numerous wet loose slides that ran a long distance down solar faces on Great Northern. See photo.