Frostbite

We opted to stay below the bustle at the pass today and made a lap up Frostbite Hill to see how things have been holding up. Despite the strong sun, temps remained mostly cool with help from a light breeze. We found the ridgeline to be firm, solar aspects to be either crusty or just barely softened, and shady aspects still holding soft snow and pockets of surface facets. We dug around 3700' on a steep N-facing slope, and although we encountered a layer of facets, stability tests yielded no propagation. We observed some minor wet loose activity on Arkose and Punk Spines that might be more recent than 48 hours but remains unconfirmed. The largest slides had run maybe 6-800' at most. For the most part it seems like the breeze and mild temps are keeping the wet loose activity at bay. Spring is here, but the corn needs more time to bake before the solar aspects yield a quality crop. 

Dug on a steep, north-facing aspect at about 3700'. HS was about 110cm and the slope had likely previously avalanched during the late January event. There was an obvious layer of faceted snow mid pack that produced broken failures - but no propagation - in snowpit tests. (ECTN26/27). It still seems evident that the structure to support a persistent slab problem exists, but likey some surface faceting and drying out of recent snow has lessened the tensile strength of the slab. This reinforces why we might be finding this problem less in polar aspects and more present on solar aspects where the sun and warmth are working to thicken the upper snowpack into a cohesive slab. An avalanche triggered today and some previous naturally triggered slabs sympathetic to wet loose last week all point to this being the case.