Quick report
- Aspect
- North
- Red Flags
- Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 3109 m
- Slope Angle
- 33°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Lots of facets around today. We dug the pit to be representative of a higher elevation slope. </p>
Fun(ky) tour today. Went up and tried to ski pink pine. Sugar top to bottom. A bit thin coverage to say the least.
Then we headed up to birthday chutes off of red top. The snow was a good bit deeper on the North and Northwest facing slopes up there. As it was day 1 in the Wasatch we dug a full pit to see the facets we had been hearing about. We picked a slope just at the tree-line that had had a good bit of wind affect. Around 3 we dug our pit as it started to snow. Given the time we decided to head back to the trailhead and leave birthday chutes for another day. The new snow will be very welcome, though there is a lot of sugar out there.
Forecaster Comments: Good profile of White Pine - thanks. Quite a bit of variability but weak surface/near surface seems the rule with scattered hard wind slabs around.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>10cm thick, very sporadic, wind slabs sitting on varying quality facets. Not super reactive, CT25, ECTP13 at 10cm below surface. We didn't find any large load where we were though</p> <p>Where we dug the facets were best formed at the ground. About 2mm and reactive. Most of snowpack was faceted as well, but small grained (1+mm) and not reactive. A new load may change that though.</p> <p>The facets buried at the ground below the snow/dirt layer were reactive ECTP 19 @ 30cm from ground.</p> <p>In other areas where the pack was thinner the facets were much better formed and we noticed some additional surface hoar. </p>
Very thin layer of surface hoar on a 10cm wind slab on poorly formed facets