Sgts North of Brundage Resort

I traveled cautiously as I started seeing red flags like cracking and very recent natural Avalanche in the cliffs above Hartley Maeadws that may be due to an earthquake that happened today, hard to say. I observed a lot of cracking, whumphs, and wind loading from fairly strong, westerly winds, and an active cornice fall that triggered another 1-1.5’ thick wind slab avalanche on the east aspect of the peak. Travel was good and the lower snowpack was stable...The main concern was the upper foot which is soft and very sensitive...was propagating in snowpit tests easily.  With more snow and gaining hardness, the upper snowpack will become more sensitive atop persistent weak layers.

Height of snow was 170cm or 5FT 7 Inches at 7,160’Graupel on the surface as well as rimed stellars which skied great…primary concern for easy human triggers: 24 cm below the the surface the new snow is sitting on layer of buried surface hoar, near surface facets, and grapple on top of our most recent rain crust... failures were propagating easy-ECTP2…the slab is soft and really doesn’t have much cohesion to none at all. In some test pits the surface hoar was visible to the naked eye.