Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
- Collapsing
- isolated
We pushed out a little farther in the ward drainage today. Cold overnight temperatures "softened" the wind protected snow a bit and increased quality from yesterday in this area. But a strong east wind was hammering the upper sierra crest and we could see snow blowing onto windward (westerly) slopes. Only small isolated wind slabs existed on those west aspects though. Skiing was great below the wind line, and saw limited signs of instability. But thats the tricky thing with persistent slabs. And in fact we did experience some minor collapses and cracking in the skin track, but without a trained eye it wouldn't have been too noticeable. On one of our hikes back up we pulled off the skin track and dug a snowpit on a West aspect at 7800ft, curious about the distribution and sensitivity of the "new" PWLs. Sure enough, we got a pretty complex setup going on down there. Not the Tahoe norm. Heads up with incoming loading event. Snowpit data: W aspect, 7800ft HS: 100cm HST: 25cm Buried surface hoar on new/old interface Near Crust Facets above + below melt/freeze crust just below the buried surface hoar CTVE (SC) + CTE (SC) had multiple failure points, either in near crust facets + buried surface hoar.
Weather
- Air Temp
- below freezing
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- moderate
- Recent Snowfall
- 25cm
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
strong E winds at crest, cloud cover slowly cleared throughout day, no precip, below freezing temps