Quick report
- Aspect
- Northeast
- Red Flags
- Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 2621 m
- Slope Angle
- 30°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>We didn't get much of a view of surrounding bowls to see if there had been recent avalanches but we did notice some some settling on the low angled terrain we were riding. The bottom few inches of the snowpack near the ground has some nasty facets.</p>
We dug a couple of pits today to check out the snow structure and see exactly what was going on in the snowpack. Unfortunately, it was pretty much like we expected. The bottom several inches were completely rotted out and sugary. We hopped off the main drag on the lower beginner bowl around 8600' on a northeast facing slope. Slope angle was fairly low. One pit was 28 degrees and the other was 30 degrees. Between the two of us, we did several compression tests and had failures about 10" down from the surface at 6, 10, and 13 taps. It took a little more to get the faceted ground layer to release, but we did get failures at 19, 20, and 23 hits. What was most concerning to us though, was when we ran an extended column test and got a solid failure on isolation. Definitely Q1 and very energetic. It appeared that the facets were beginning to round a little, but with this ECTP on isolation, we will be choosing our lines wisely for a while.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Several inches of weak, rotten snow near the ground. It made us want to stay on low angled terrain today.</p> <p>As we were leaving today, the storm was arriving in earnest and was dumping plenty of new snow. If that trend continued, I'm sure that the new snow on top of last night's 9-10" could make things interesting.</p>
Found a nice amount of fresh powder. Snow was fairly inverted though. We were pleasantly surprised by the coverage and nice base density.