Red Meadow/Link Mountain

We traveled to the Red Meadow area in the central Whitefish today to look for recent avalanche activity and the depth of free water in the snowpack. 

• The wet avalanche show at the middle elevations appears to be recently underway.
  • These avalanches are entraining significant quantities of dry and wet snow below as they descend. The largest on Red Benchmark had knocked down multiple trees, and appeared to pile debris 10+ feet deep. 
  • The majority of wet avalanches we saw in the terrain occurred below 6000', with a few pushing toward 6500' on the northeast path of Link Mountain. There were widespread rollerballs and pinwheels, especially below 5800'.
  • Pinwheels and wet sluffs were easy to trigger on a our descent in sheltered terrain below 6000'.
• Rain runnels were widespread to about 6500'. 
• While we sunk knee deep into wet snow up until about 5800', and the snowpack became more supportable by the time we reached 6000'. There, water had only made it 2-4" deep into the snowpack on our steep test slope. 
• Recent large slab avalanches on Lake Mountain and Red Meadow Benchmark, in addition to our snowpit, confirmed the presence of the January Drought Layer (surface hoar on a crust) in this area. The JDL was 4' deep at 6000', intact, and dry. 
• The road into Red Meadow from the North Fork is still in surprisingly good shape. The North Fork Rd, however, is not. 

We dug a snowpit on an east aspect at 6050'. Slope angle ~30 degrees. HS 300 cm

Wet snow was confined to the upper 5-10 cm of the snowpack at this elevation in this location. 

The 3/9 was down 55 cm and the JDL was down 130 cm (both surface hoar and the crust upon which it lies were intact).