Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
It was a cold and windy morning in the Crystal area. The type of day where you walk uphill in a puffy and winter hat, trying to remind yourself that once upon a time, you were a hardened New Englander.
It wasn't difficult to tell what the primary problem for the day was. Actively blowing snow was obvious everywhere you looked, along with textured surfaces, new drifts, fresh cornices, wind-stiffened snow, and cracking of the snow surface. Travel wasn't particularly difficult, but it did take some extra time and a lot of extra care to manage the wind and cold. Getting to the ridgeline between Cement and Lakes Basin, I bailed on my plan to drop into Lakes Basin after seeing natural activity on multiple slopes and shooting cracks en route to my pit location.
The snow surface is a mixed bag, but wind and sun sheltered locations are still holding soft snow.
There was cracking on most wind-affected slopes that I traveled on. In some locations, long shooting cracks were observed.Weather
Brutally cold all day with fierce easterly winds. The wind speed did diminish slightly late morning, coinciding with an inch or two of fresh snow.
Snowpack
The upper snowpack is back to being variable. Throughout my tour today, I observed scoured areas down to a crust/ground, soft powder, breakable crust, subtle melt-freeze crusts, and the full range of wind-affected snow. There has been significant snowpack settlement, as evident by ski and boot pen.
The shallow wind slabs are not well bonded to the snow below, and I had multiple failures on isolation in hand pits and more formalized tests, like an ECT.
On sun-exposed slopes, there is a thin crust either on or just below the surface.
The JDL and 1/10 looked better than I have seen them, but I was only able to get one hole in today. It was too cold to sit in a pit for long.
Avalanche
Not a lot of new avalanche activity, but there was an odd slide that occurred right as I approached the ridgeline to peek into Lakes Basin. It was shallow and small (less than D1) and either failed naturally just as I was peeking over the edge or I remotely triggered it from a few feet away. I also observed a natural "cornice"/wind-drift failure on the same ridgeline. Two blocks of snow fell and triggered a shallow slab on the slope below.