Mt Jefferson

Quick report

We found a melt freeze crust on all of the aspects that we travelled, at nearly all elevations. Up to ~8000 ft on S-W aspects we found that this snow softened nicely into good corn skiing. No surface snow entrainment or roller-balling was noted . Above this we found a variety of snow surfaces—breakable and supportable sun crust, rime, and chalky sastrugi. On many aspects we noted several melt freeze crusts in the upper snowpack. On the one small north facing aspect (4500 ft) we travelled on we found the snow to be quite weak, with very large (2-3 cm) surface hoar overlying sugary faceted snow. This observation is quite limited as the slope we traveled on was very small, making it hard to generalize to others. No instability noted

Weather

Air Temp

40

Cloud Cover

clear

Wind Loading

none

Rain Elevation

8000 ft

Recent Snowfall

0

Clear skies, temperatures were around 40 degrees at 7000 feet. Winds were gusting moderate above 8000 feet keeping snow surfaces firm.

Snowpack

We didn’t dig a pit as we were confident in the stability of the snowpack and instead were focused on the surface conditions that existed prior to the new snow coming in.