Quick report
- Aspect
- North
- Red Flags
- Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 2621 m
- Slope Angle
- 10°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>We didn't observe any collapsing today. In some places your pole would sink through the supportable snow and into bottomless facets.</p>
This snow pack seemed to have everything and I can't recall so many different forms in one pit. This one had rime, grauple, settled snow, rounded grains, surface hoar, and facets.
This pit was in an open area and the size of the surface hoar (6-8mm) was impressive. A photo is attached below. A photo of the depth hoar near the bottom is also attached.
In our stability tests, we both expected failure on the buried surface hoar but with more energy. Our compressive test scores were all between 13-15 but with Q2 shear quality. We did get one result in the facets after removing the surface hoar and snow above that.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Plenty of facets sit below snow from early December setting up our familiar persistent slab problem. </p> <p>Buried surface hoar in this area also provides another weak layer that is now capped by the most recent snow. This could become tomorrow's persistent slab. See the profile below for more details.</p> <p>We didn't push slope angles or personally observe any new snow instability but the new snow had plenty of water and it is sitting on weak existing snow. Avalanches in the new snow seemed very possible.</p>
The snow skied reasonably well but did have a minor rime crust.