Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
All around stable avalanche conditions. There was a reactive density inversion in the top 15cm of the new snow however it was not problematic. Although easy to trigger with ski cuts, it never propagated nor ran more than 10ft. When triggered, it simply didn't have enough mass to stay as a cohesive slab. I might suspect the places where this might be more problematic would be anywhere the wind deposited enough snow to build up a semblance of a slab although we did not observe this anywhere during our travels below 6000' today. This might be interesting to watch with the coming storm, it seems other observers found a similar layer near Crystal today as well.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 26
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 2400
- Recent Snowfall
- 5
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Calm, cloudy, and chilly weather for most of the day with snow starting around 1400 and intensifying to S2 by 1330 when we left. The freezing level was much lower than expected, snow was falling to 2200' and sticking at 2600' at 1600 on the west side of the pass on the highway.
Snowpack
The snowpack was 89cm deep at 5500'. The bottom 40cm of the snowpack had been previously saturated with rain. The top 10cm of that layer (40-30cm off the ground) was refrozen while the snow below was still wet, neither layer was reactive or problematic. There was roughly 50cm of new snow on top of the rain-affected crust with the top 15cm having a density inversion. This fist-hard snow lay below ~10cm of 4-finger hard snow at the surface. This F/4F interface failed twice without propagation in two Extended Column Tests (ECTN12 @74cm, Q2). It also failed when inserting the shovel for a Shovel Shear Test without any pressure (STV @80cm), tried this 3 times. See attached snowpit profile for more info.