Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Dry and cold weather persists with variable snow surfaces, yet sheltered areas can offer quality conditions while mid winter sun is always a bonus.
Some notable Loose Dry avalanches that likely ran around a week ago on south-facing slopes. Large enough to see from a good distance.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- clear
- Wind Loading
- none
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Low elevation clouds to start. Splitter bluebird up high. Clear skies throughout elevations by the afternoon and end of day. Calm winds.
Snowpack
We traveled between elevations 5000 - 6500 primarily on East and Northerly aspects. Surface hoar is on the surface in many open areas. Recent cold temperatures are influencing the top 1ft of the snowpack where snow grains near the surface are in the beginning stages of becoming sugary, incohesive faceted grains. On southerly aspects a 1-2 cm thick sun crust easily slides on these weak grains, yet this crust would need a lot of force to break across a terrain feature. On Norherly aspects we observed small isolated cracking in a thin, 5cm thick, wind packed surface layer over the recently formed weaker faceted grains. Observing a lower sensitivity with intermittent and isolated distribution of this thin wind skin across terrain it did not change our overall travel plan but it was a discussion point.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1.5
- Type
- L
- Aspect
- S
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 5800 ft
One loose dry slide looks to have triggered a slab once moving downhill. The slab portion was less than 100 feet wide.