Crystal Backcountry

The plan was to go for a long walk, linking up multiple basins. We wanted to look for recent avalanche activity to help support or deny our suspicions of the persistent slab problem. Although the weather didn't help much with visibility, we were able to spot plenty of recent avalanches in our small windows. We spotted three on Bullion Peak right off the bat. We had a great view of a very large slab over at Crystal Resort in the Niagaras area. Tons of red flag bullseye information that the snowpack is not happy right now under all that wonderful powder.

While traveling toward Lakes Basin, we again noticed some shallow crowns at the base of cliffs being filled in by snow and wind. The visibility prevented much in the way of spyglassing Lakes and made us bail on our plan to head to Big Crow. The trailbreaking was deep and tiresome, anyway.

Getting back to the car, skies went bluebird (of course) and we were able to spot a very deep slab up near Bear Gap/Black Tusk area. 

Overall, we were spooked and kept to the ridges as much as we could. It's hard to resist skiing the pristine powder-filled slopes, but you gotta do it.

Deep snow immersion is a real issue right now.

There is a lot of snow out there, measured in feet. And most of the surface snow is unconsolidated. The wind was blowing it around - building out cornices, creating fresh drifts, and putting a light wind skin on the surface in some areas.

Digging on a NE aspect at 6500' I found a much shallower snowpack than I had anticipated, only 148cm. The EFC was rotting more than I had seen in other places recently and there were facets above it. 10cm above the EFC, the 2/14 was easily identifiable, which was a change to what I saw on Wednesday in Bullion Basin. It had weak grains that were easy to identify. 

Test results were somewhat inconclusive, but blocks were pulling out fairly clean on the 2/14 and then stepping down to the EFC outside the range of normal tests.