Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading, Cracking, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>It was quite easy to determine that the hazard was rising today. </p>
Pics:
1 Criss-Cross Wind drifting in upper bowl below Cardiff Pass
2. Wind slab 6" thick and pencil hard in mid elevation loaded terrain features. supportable enough to lure you out onto and hollow underneath. Difficult to get to crack and will support a lot of subsequent loading. Until it doesn't.
3 Some early sun was visible through the clouds but that changed quickly this morning.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>With such strong wind speeds, this problem is specific to terrain features where the wind was able to travel along longer fetches and deposit snow into more open terrain features. Bowls such as the upper east through south facing terrain of Cardiff Pass/Peak were channeling wind in amazing ways. This lead to more patchy wind slab that difficult to detect due to visibility. Tree bands and rolling terrain decelerated the wind and some softer drifts were forming at mid elevations. The amount of previously fallen snow that had been untouched by wind until now provides ample material for transport. I believe we may see some of the largest avalanches of the year in the alpine, particularly where these new hard slabs lay on top of persistent weaklayers initially buried on 12/11. Found myriad locations where even the 6" thick windslabs were pencil hard and hollow sounding. Would not be surprised to see windslabs multiple feet thick above 9500' in open terrain.</p> <p>Just the same old thing. Now just being overloaded by thick hard slab. </p>
Limited travel, but all nature of surface conditions. Upper elevation is all wind effected and anything solar with some pitch picked up a thin (barely supportable) melt freeze crust on 1/26 with during breaks in the clouds. On low angle slopes at mid elevation you could still find soft settled powder among small glades of trees.