Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading, Cracking, Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Easy to provoke cracking within the recently wind-drifted snow lee of the ridge top. Experienced a few localized collapses in places where a thin crust, below the new snow, caps the weak facets. </p>
On a 36-degree, east-facing slope at ~9500 feet, I found that the warm temperatures had saturated the upper snowpack and refrozen into a thick, hard crust. I did not find faceted snow here. The weakest interface was between the new snow that fell yesterday and the dense and snow from today.
On a west-facing slope near 9600 feet, we found a very concerning upper snowpack. A thin crust caps a layer of weak faceted snow. Some of the weakest snow we observed during our day.
Photos are of the associated snow pits above. Photo 1: East aspect, Photo 2: West aspect.
East
West
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Observed easy cracking with fresh wind drifts on north aspects. Some of the drifts were up to 2 feet deep. Instabilities were confined to the immediate ridge top and tapered down-slope quickly.. These cohesive drifts were sensitive to human-triggering but lacked the volume or connectivity to run more than 10-15 feet.</p>