Fish Lake

We all must keep in mind the foundation of our snowpack above the treeline in the Southern Wallowas is bad.  Once we get more snow, it will be imperative that skiers, snowmobilers, etc ride with caution.  Due to the overall shallow depth of our current snowpack, numerous factors are transforming the snow into a weak state on the daily.  A good relationship would be starting with a poor foundation for your house.  Once you start building, the entire house falls over when any inclement weather occurs, because the basal structure was built poorly.  

A poor snowpack structure was observed just above Fish Lake.  The height of the snow was 70cm or just over 2'.  At the bottom of the snowpack, there is a knife-hard crust, with a layer of weak facets (sugar snow) sitting above the crust.  From here to the surface there are a couple of other stout crusts with weak snow surrounding the crusts.  The December 3rd rain-on-snow event produced a stout crust, and the snow above it (approx. 1') is losing strength.  On the surface is a widespread surface hoar layer.  None of this is good, and we are only waiting on a solid load to start seeing avalanches.