Our good snowpack right now encourages complacent route finding and skiing. Yes, it is an unusually good snowpack, but don't blindly trust it. Ease into it and let it earn your trust.
These are less prominent and more subtle (softer and harder to feel underfoot) than we first thought. Inspect the snow carefully and investigate the various storm interfaces. Even though we want to trust the snowpack right now, we're hesitant to actually do it.
We are looking at about 60cm of settled snow from these recent storms and just over 2m total snow at treeline. Today we saw very little wind affect anywhere other than the north spray lakes area. More than one comment was made among us forecasters on how it was almost eerie to have this much snow and no major avalanche concerns. We do have some concerns with windslabs in wind prone areas and how they are bonding with the Jan 29th layer, but we don't have our usual deep persistent layer haunting us. First a global pandemic, and now a Kananaskis snowpack with no depth hoar!!! Who would have thought we'd see both of those in a single lifetime let alone a single winter?
Tonight we start our plunge into the deep freeze that will be next week. Overnight low will be -26. The daytime high will bump up to about -14. Valley bottom winds will be light, and generally from the north. The upper winds will continue to be out of the west, but these will be too high to matter to us. The flurries will continue tomorrow as well. Not a lot of accumulation is expected.
Nothing new was seen today.
