Observation: Park City Ridgeline

No avalanche problems at the moment. Didn't get into high elevations where wind slabs from today could be reactive. After 3 field sessions in our course, and much hole digging in a wide range of aspects and locations, the consensus among instructors and students was very similair- we have a strong snowpack. Structure of the snowpack was generally good but there are many areas where structure is middle of the road and a few outliers where structure is poor (all on the north half of the compass). There are faceted layers in the snowpack and they lay anywhere from 10-40cms from the ground. We felt that these layers probably would not be an issue with any future gradual loading but a big shock in load to the snowpack could result in avalanches stepping down to these layers. Main issue in structure for any future loading is weak snow at the surface. For the most part we found that any weak layers would not propagate a fracture but again a few outlier results where we had ECTP results with a fracture character of SP or SC on the above mentioned weak layers.

All northerly aspects sheltered from previous winds had quite a bit of NSF. We observed some large surface hoar but all observed SH was laying down on the surface. South and southeast aspects were melt/freeze crust.