Quick report
The rain/snow line was at 8200 feet. At 8200 ft there was a dusting of snow with a minor rain crust below, assuming there was some rain before it snowed at this elevation. This minor rain crust disappeared within a hundred feet or so and anywhere not being touched by the wind held up to 1 inch of stellar precipitation particles from yesterdays storm. The largest depost of wind blown snow I saw all day was about 2 inches deep in a concavity on the ridge. On the NW aspect I hiked out of this new snow was cracking indicating that the new snow was bonding to itself. The NE-N-NW terrain held cold surface facets. Old tracks were hard but grippable and any area without tracks was awesome. A few areas of variable surface wind crusts still linger in the bowl. I rode out on an east facing slope that held a few centimeters of surface melt on a slightly textured wind/sun affect. While snow was being blown onto this aspect all afternoon, there was no deposts of snow as it may have been too firm for any of the facets being blown to stick.
No instabilities observed.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- scattered
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 8200 ft
- Recent Snowfall
- trace
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
The cloud cover ranged from scattered to broken with a thin high cloud for a majority of the day. The sun came out with few clouds around 12:30. and then thicker clouds came back in at 3pm covering most of thes sky. There was a moderate amount of wind blowing from the west on the ridge with a a small of amount of blowing snow. There was not much to speak of as far as depositing snow on the east face. A light cool wind could also be felt at the bottom of the bowl. The winds and cloud cover kept temperatures cooler than they haver been and it almost felt like winter up there.
Snowpack
I dug two pits around 8700 ft: One on a N aspect and one on a NW aspect with no noteable results on snow pack tests. The most surprising find was that the snowpack height was 100-110 cm. Foot penetration ranged from 15 cm to 25cm on a variety of aspects and elevations. The top 40 cm was faceted. The top 20 cm was fist hard facets and then a clear density change in the facets below that with 4F trending to 1F. A thin layer of softer facets were above the Jan 1 crust. I got no results on PSTs or CTs on this layer. No Jan 27 surface hoar layer was found in this area.