Quick report
- Cracking
- widespread
- Collapsing
- widespread
We toured up Jennifer St. trail cutting the skin track. The new storm snow was relatively dense, but not wet, and oftentimes we found ourselves sinking in as deep as our knees despite being on large, wide powder skis. Our plan was to stick to the ridge line up Jennifer St. trail, and avoid steeper aspects to the north and south of the ridge line and ski down on lower angle terrain south of Jennifer St trail. As the initial climb became steeper, we started to notice isolated collapses (generally near shallowly buried Manzanita), and minor cracking (shorter than the lengths of our skis) near tree wells and rollers. As we emerged into the more open areas higher up we began to see shooting cracks ranging from 25-50+ feet in length. We also experienced a major collapse where you could visually discern the surface of the snow moving and you could feel the collapse propagate from above to below us (like it swept underneath us headed downslope). After those experiences we decided to bail. We found a spot just on the northern side of the ridge that was shallower and minimally exposed to avalanche hazard from above to transition and dig a quick pit to look at what had been collapsing and cracking. We did a column test and that showed multiple sudden collapse CTE failures on the recent storm snow, one failure about 10cm deep, and one at the interface between the new storm snow and the previous surface about 50cm deep. We also saw a sudden collapse CTM failure on deeper faceted layer under a solar crust at about 90cm deep. We skied to the nearest low angle terrain and out. Finished the day touring off of Allison Dr in low angle terrain where we continued to experience collapsing and cracking. Albeit, this cracking and collapsing was minor compared to what we saw at Jennifer and we toured completely in low angle terrain.