Quick report
- Aspect
- East
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Wind Loading, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 3109 m
- Slope Angle
- 28°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Wind slab formation was the biggest red flag of the day. Easy to avoid.</p>
Excellent surface hoar hunting at lower elevations.
The melt/freeze crust from 1/6 is quite variable in thickness from location to location. This crust is more developed than what I have been finding in my travels but interesting to me is that this is from a north facing slope at 10,200 ft. Easy, clean shears on this layer in this location. Small grain facets on both top and bottom of crust.
Traveled from 7400-10,300 ft., all aspects, slope angles to 38°. New snow instabilities seem to have settled out in the area I was traveling. Clean shears in CT's but with moderate to hard effort. I could not get a fracture to propagate in any of my ECT's on East and North facing slopes. Still not the best snowpack structure.The snow surface is definitely weakening so we'll have to keep an eye on the new snow forecasted over the weekend. Wind will be the other factor to keep in mind as the wind was moving snow today and forming wind slabs, albeit shallow ones where I was.
Moderate to Considerable danger tomorrow.
Snowpack
The storm snow from earlier in the week is settled and consolidated into more of a slab. No sluffing on steep slopes. South aspects and off aspects that got sun the last two days were crusted. Settled soft snow on shady aspects. Impressively large and beautiful surface hoar at lower elevations, Scattered surface hoar up high but most shady slopes at all elevations were faceting; surface and near surface.