Quick report
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>No red flags. Low danger</p> <p>On Thursday, we are supposed to have mostly clear skies, so the sun may create some small, sluffs within what little new snow we have right now. It's hard to get too excited about sluffs from one inch of new snow. But hey, it's the only excitement in town right now.</p> <p>I was hoping that the record high temperatures from a couple days ago would have completely destroyed the near surface faceted snow but the upper elevation, sun and wind sheltered slopes still have some fine grained faceted snow that could be a weak layer if we ever get a slab on top of it. It's much less fragile than before the big warmup, but it's still there. There's also some faceted snow under some of the sun and wind crusts that could be a localized problem if we every get a slab. But it's Low danger right now.</p>
This is about as clear as it got today, which was in the morning. After this, the fog and clouds filled up all of Little Cottonwood Canyon for the rest of the afternoon, making for a gloomy day.
Snowpack
Just an inch of snow can make a lot of difference, especially when the snow surface conditions are so bad to begin with. There's been only one significant storm in January and it looks like we'll get to the end of the month without another. The snow surface shows. Under the skiff of new snow, there's various kinds of sun and wind crusts with damp snow below about 8,500' and there's still some dry, loud powder (near-surface faceted snow) on north-east above about 9,000' on slopes steeper than 30 degrees. Good luck finding slopes that are not already tracked out, but if you do, it's actually pretty good. If you didn't know better, you might call it powder.