Quick report
Nice tour today on Castle peak, looking for good skiing and avalanche problems (we found both). The snowpack continues to be quite variable, with a mix of cold snow, supportable crusts, breakable crusts, and everything in between. There was a pretty solid layer of 3-5mm surface hoar in low-lying areas, still present in the late morning, and solar aspects were showing signs of melting by midday today. The sheltered northerly aspects are doing a great job of holding cold snow. We dropped down a bit into the NE side of the Castle/Basin ridge to ski and look into the snowpack. @8600' on a NE aspect we dug a pit and test results show that propagation is still possible on a layer just above the lower of two rain crusts, about 2 feet below the surface. See video and profile for details.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- clear