Two Ocean Mountain

Last nights cold temperatures gave the top of the snowpack a good refreeze. At middle elevations there is still lots of very wet snow below this refreeze, but hopefully with continued cold temperatures will permiate a little deeper.

The new snow has mostly covered up the dust layer and is bonding well to the old snow surfaces, likely due to warm temperatures. On the highest ridgelines there where some shallow soft wind slabs developing, maybe 3-4 inches deep.

Coverage is still good at upper elevations, the lower middle elevations are starting to look thin on southerly aspects, but overall Togwotee is faring better than our other forecast regions.

I dug a pit at on a north facing slope at 9,900'. The height of snow as 190cm. You could tell that the snowpack had seem some surface melt and water percolation. One layer of pooling was about 30cm down, and the significant one was 50cm down on the January Drought Layer. There were percolation columns present in the snowpack. 

The upper part of the JDL was moist from free water pooling on the facets, and contained 4F hard rounding facets. The were moist and showing signs of rounding, but still facets. Despite that, there are multiple frozen solid crusts atop it and it is very unlikely the weight of a rider could impact this layer.

Overall the snowpack has seen some heat, but is not nearly as wet or isothermic as similar slopes across our forecast region. This doesn't really seem to be problematic, just something of note.

Something I found interesting was that the dust layer, that is usually confined to the new/old snow interface, had seaped down into the top 20cm of snow, likely with water that was moving in the snowpack.