Crater Crest

We toured up the North face of Crater Crest to the West Ridge to see the overall wind effects on the landscape and see how warmer air temperatures were affecting the surface of the snowpack. On our ski tour up the skin track, we found either a stout windboard that was barely able to hold an edge or dense powder snow in sheltered terrain. It was truly a checkboard of variable surface  conditions( ski crampons are pretty useful right now). We gained the ridge and found the near treeline terrain was heavily wind-affected and less variable as all the snow was solid wind board. We ditched our skis and boot-packed to the alpine terrain. In the alpine, barely any snow was present on our exposed ridgeline, as last weekend's storm brought high winds that stripped the existing snow. We transitioned and skied down a N slope in the trees. We dropped below 8,000ft and found the snow becoming sticky, Warm air temperatures and no wind at lower elevations were creating wet surface snow in the afternoon. We used a few test slopes to trigger small loose wet avalanches. 

We were able to kick off a few small Wet Loose avalanches on test slopes below treeline on N aspects. The surface layer of the snowpack was saturated due to warm ambient air temperatures and trees that blocked the cooling winds on the surface of the snow. We saw no signs of instability NTL or ATL.