Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Fully expecting flat light but excited for the fresh snow we went to "get walled" to try to gain any perspective we could. With 4'' inches of snow overnight and more soft snow from the previous week surface conditions were all time! Starting with a warm up on Missing Couloir pole probing and kick turn digging revealed the same Hatcher Pass structure we've all been dealing with, a stout crust topping well developed facets. Switching to booting at 4150' the surface under the crust was mostly supportable besides the occasional break through and one faceted rock pit trying to swallow me whole. The down was fantastic with face shots yet slow moving sluffs. Once down we started our way towards Lost Couloir. While the apron held the same supportable crusts the rock band to the side of the couloir was slightly more punchy and we got one isolated shooting crack during trail breaking in this location. The boot up Lost was very similar to Missing with mostly supportable crust underneath the soft snow. The surface snow was mostly still low density however there were isolated locations of wind drifted snow captured by features on the climbers right of the couloir. With the fresh snow gaining density and light fading we made our descent at 4,800'. The down was once again fantastic riding with some slow moving sluff and a small pull out of the dense snow on the wind drifted feature. The weather during this tour was sustained light wind and light snow. There was not much observed transport of snow with the exception of light spin drift down the rock walls of Lost. We did not note any recent avalanche activity however visibility was incredibly limited.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- obscured
- Wind Loading
- light
- Recent Snowfall
- 10
- Snow Avail For Transport
- large amounts
Snowpack
Same poor structure as seen previously with the slab facet sandwich in the upper 1' of the snowpack. 6''-10'' of low density moist snow above the slab 4'' from overnight. While most of the new snow remained undisturbed there were isolated locations of wind drifted snow on features near the N sidewall of the couloir. The surface snow while still fist hard was starting to slab up and feel upside down when we stopped short of the top out at 4800' on Lost Couloir.