Snow Lake Divide

It was a soggy day at The Pass, no getting around that one. Travel down low is still a little rugged, with frozen treebombs, crusts, open creeks, etc. The rain and wet snow actually helped in my opinion - and we made it to Source Lake without too many shenanigans. From there, travel was fairly easy up to the Divide, apart from avoiding some old avalanche debris. We didn't experience breakable crust anywhere we skied today, which is a step in the right direction. Although we didn't cover much ground.

We experienced rain until 3700' where it started to transition into something you could call mixed precip. By the time we got to Source Lake, it was certainly snowing, but a wet snow. Full on snow storm on the divide, but we were so wet that we got cold and hustled out of there after a short snowpack observation and jumping on some test slopes.

As noted in the snowpack section, the bond was less favorable than I would have anticipated or cared for based on the warm temps. We skied the crust the whole way down and easily pushed snow anytime it got steep or unsupported. Actually skied fairly well if you can avoid the avalanche debris.

Was able to push snow on unsupported or steep test slopes. It slid fairly easily on the underlying crust.

I didn't spend a lot of time investigating the snowpack since I was soaked to the skin and cold. I purposefully dug in a shallow location, SE and found that there are multiple melt-freeze crusts in the upper snowpack. The surprise was moist snow much deeper in the pack than I expected. Small column and large column tests were unremarkable.

Jumping on test features and using hand pits as I traveled, it appeared that the bond at the new/old interface was moderate, at best. I didn't get up high enough to where the snow was driest.