Observation: Uintas

The biggest concern today was the new snow. The storm snow wasn't bonding well with the old snow surface and loose snow avalanches were easy to initiate in steep terrain. While they were manageable, if you weren't paying attention, you could have easily been caught off guard and had your skis knocked out from underneath you. Dug a lot in the snow and was finding a lot of variability and generally poor snowpack structure but wasn't getting alarming results from pit tests. Other than the new snow instabilities, pit tests were unreactive or failing with hard effort. One common theme was weak snow and failures in tests under the rime crust when it was found where we were digging. The weakest and most reactive interfaces were in the upper 60 cm's (2 feet) of the snowpack. I'd call tomorrow's danger moderate for loose, new snow avalanches and soft, shallow wind slabs on most aspects in steeper terrain.