Quick report
None observed.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 28
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- moderate
- Rain Elevation
- Not observed
- Recent Snowfall
- 8
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Overcast skies, and light winds from the SE with moderate gusts. It started snowing around noon and snow flurries continued throughout the field day. The moderate gusts will fill up our snow pit with snow available for transport.
Snowpack
Snow depths varied greatly from bare ground to up to 9' deep in the middle of the Peak 3 gully. Snow coverage is still sparse- with many exposed trees, shrubs, rocks, and boulders. We dug multiple hand pits and conducted multiple pole probes on our skin track-up. The snowpack structure was predominately wind slab on top of facets with two prominent melt-freeze crusts- with more thin melt-freeze crusts at lower elevations. We were not able to find any of the buried surface hoar in the wind-sheltered terrain we found the last time we were in the area.
We dug one pit a little over 3000'. We found two melt-freeze crusts- the upper crust had significant faceting underneath the crust (2-3mm grains with a layer that was ~3 cm thick), and the second thinner crust deeper in the snowpack did not have significant faceting around the crust. We also found 4-6mm basal facets with striations at the base of the snowpack. The rest of the snowpack was mostly wind slabs- fresh wind slab from the recent loading event and an older wind slab base. We will be tracking both the crust layers and the basal facets, but are not concerned about them at the moment. The most likely way someone would trigger an avalanche in the Chugach State Park right now would be a fresh shallow wind slab. The ski descent in the middle of the gully mostly skied like a groomer- with patches of soft snow in between sastrugi waves.