Quick report
- Red Flags
- Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading, Cracking, Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
Its the moment we've all been waiting for. I started my tour at 0700 this morning while the snow was still falling at a high rate. There was about a foot of new snow on the ground and no evidence of windloading in sheltered terrain and light windloading in exposed terrain. There was a break in the snow from 0800-1030, then the snow picked up to a high precip rate quickly. Temps seemed to be dropping slowly throughout the day. I got some small cracks and one small collapse on the skinner. I skied some low angle terrain with 1'-2' of mid-density snow. I was surprised at how well set up the snow felt; there were no signs of instability. Coming down around 1200, the snow was still coming down quite steady.
The snowpack is in a bad spot right now: rapid loading with a huge facet base. Powder fever is upon us and the first "symptom" is poor decision making. Stay safe our there.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>We finally got a powder day! With all this new snow comes the loading (and possibly overloading) of our very weak base layer. I didn't experience much crack or collapsing on my tour today but I think it is a false sense of security. Right now it seems like widespread failure of the weak layer hangs in the balance. It is possible the the new snow we receive tonight could cause a widespread avalanche cycle, it could be that a skier will be enough to overload the PWL, or possibly we will just have a moderate avalanche cycle. We will see. </p> <p>The new snow seems to be coming in right side up but in some areas it has fallen on graupel/hail/suncrusts/facets so it may not be bonded well with what is below. I suspect in steep and high-elevation terrain we will see a lot of new snow slides but on my low angle, low elevation tour today I couldn't get anything to move. </p>