Paddys East - Shallow snowpack, rocks, facets and powder!

<p>Nice day in Paddys Peak area. Snowpack is thin in this area for the time of the year, there is only about 50 to 60 cm snow depth from road elevation to about 1000m. Quite a bit of work to move around in this shallow and bottomless snowpack. Once above this elevation snow coverage starts improving especially in gully features that are filled in. As it's often the case in this area, we found lots of spatial variability in snow depths and conditions. The snowpack is heavily faceted with hollow and sugary snow near the bottom in shallow areas (ridges, sides of gullies). It is tempting to find places with stiff windslab on top of this weak snow, but it's also the more suspect locations avalanche wise. Gullies and couloirs are much more filled in with depths up to 150cm. In those areas the snowpack felt a lot firmer and consistent with few layers of concerns. There was a thin (3mm) crust, possibly from rime covered by 10cm of new light snow from the last few days (or more in windloaded areas). The new snow was bonding surprisingly well to this crust, with only a couple small loose dry observed in extreme terrain. We couldn't get this surface snow to move while skiing down. As the day progresses the south wind picked up and was moving snow around and creating small pocket of soft wind slab on lee side of gullies and depression. We carefully picked our way down to avoid thin and freshly windloaded gullies. Overall conditions were very good with great powder to be found, we just needed to carefully pick our routes and features. </p>

Terrain Ridden

Alpine slopes, Open trees, Steep slopes.

Terrain Avoided

Convex slopes.

Avalanche Conditions

Whumpfing or drum-like sounds or shooting cracks.

Snow Conditions

Powder, Wind affected.

Weather Conditions

Cloudy, Sunny, Windy.