Elephant's Hump

I toured around Elephant's Hump right around 0930. It was cold outside as my truck was showing a temperature reading of 0F when I got to the parking lot. At first the winds were moderate but within an hour our so the really picked up out of the NW. I could visibly see snow blowing off of every ridgeline and peak within the Carson Pass area with large banners off of Red Lake peak and Elephant's Back throughout my tour. The wind was intensely loading snow and blowing it all over the place creating wind drifts and wind features on mostly E-SE aspects. I did observe very reactive cracking and releasing on these features as I walked along the top of them. The new snow totals was around 25-40cms within this area, the blowing snow made it difficult to put a precise number on it.  I stopped to dig pits in a couple of spots along the way and found PWLs in both locations and had signs of instability within both locations on N aspects (see snowpack info for more details). As I climbed up the wind continued and was loading the skin tracks in front of me along the way. Near the top I transitioned over for the descent, the snow quailty was excellent on the way down and the coverage in this area was better than expected. The road is covered and traveled nicely on the way out. As I left the parking lot the winds seem to tapper off on the surface but was still blowing hard off the peaks @ 1300.

E-SE facing wind loaded pockets and features were cracking on ski cuts.

I dug two pits today. One at 8100' on a N facing aspect, the HS was 110cm. I started with compression tests and had several results, one @ 40cm down which was the new/old snow interface. This did repeat on the second test both scoring CT12SP/CT13SP.  This layer also propagated on my ECT test scoring ECTP23, however did not go on the second test. Also within this pit I did find the Jan. 2nd buried surface hoar layer ~80cm down. It did give me results during my compression test scoring CT17SP but did not propagate on the ECT, however when I pryed on the backside it released with little force. The basal facets were present and weak in this pit but did not show any signs of unstability within my test.

The second pit was at 8900' on a N aspect in a protected area within the trees. The HS was 130cm at this location. This pit had a mix of new snow, rounded grains, buried old near surface facets and very weak basal facets. The basal facets were fist hard, large, dry and noncompressible. In fact this layer was the only result I got in my compression test @ CT29. The quailty was messy but the whole column did collapse at the ground.