Quick report
- Aspect
- West
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading, Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Elevation
- 2987 m
- Slope Angle
- 33°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>All the flags are flying and poor structure has been the name of the game. </p>
This slope is within the ski area boundary of Snowbird, but has had no skier compaction or avalanche mitigation performed. ECT performed by SSP
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p> It seems the the upper layers of the pack on this aspect were starting to gain strength, but it is all sitting on top of 1-2mm facet grains capped with a sun crust.</p> <p>Saw the formation of some small cross loaded windslabs near minute terrain features, but they were a secondary concern other than that over time they may allow you to get farther out onto the slab before total failure of the snowpack.</p>
The snowpack has undergone some changes over the last few days since the blockbuster of a storm we received. The riming event on Tuesday and into early Wednesday left some interesting rime crusts in places not exposed to high wind, although they seemed to break down with warming on Wednesday afternoon. The upper elevation west-facing slope we were on had myriad textures from wind ripples to rounded pillows. The surface temp was -.01C and S-20 was -2.7C. A pencil hard 1cm wind crust was present where we dug our snowpit. Total depth was 85cm (65 cm of consolidated 4F to 1F rounds sitting atop 4F- facets). Our pit tests came up with the same results of Q1 failures at 20cm from the ground failing on faceted early November snow resting on top of a thin sun crust that capped the faceted Halloween snowstorm. In fact, we heard a faint collapse when we stepped out of our skis to dig. Slope angle averaged 33 degrees.