Quick report
quick snowmobile ride to look for avalanches, assess surface crust, and upper snowpack. Surfaces were frozen up to 5,400ft, tho not supportive to boots. Nice day for avalanche hunting. Too hot up high.
None todayWeather
- Cloud Cover
- clear
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
Valley fog below 2,500ft. Otherwise clear. Below 4,500ft, temperatures stayed cold, mostly below freezing. Significantly warmer above this elevation. At 5,000ft in the valley, light SW wind.
Snowpack
Surfaces
Frozen melt forms and, in some places, surface hoar.
This was on a thick (5-10cm) crust, but it wasn't overly stout or fully supportive for walking.
Profile
Cutthroat Lake trailhead. 4,500ft, NE
Height of snow: 147cm
Notable layers:
0-7cm: MFcr, 1F+ hard
88-91cm: RG(RGxr) P hard
91-101cm: MFcr, K- hard
Only layers in the top 25cm had seen transformation to melt-forms. Below that, grains were generally rounded. The top 90cm were moist, however, there wasn't significant water in the snowpack.
There was a crust ↓89cm with an overlying, slight weak layer.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Type
- WS
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- SW
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 7550 ft
Widespread cycle of wet avalanches and cornice falls on a variety of aspects and elevations, likely all ocurring January 12th. Slides at middle and upper elevations were more widespread and bigger, but many slides ran into low elevations. All avalanches appeared to wet/moist. Many were large, some up to D2.5. Many, including most of the D2-2.5, were slab avalanches. Some may've been initiated by conice fall. By the nature, depth, and location of crowns (aprons under cliffs, leeward/crossloaded, just below ridges, confined upper elevation gullies, etc), the slabs appeared to involve wind slab interfaces from the week prior. There were wind events on the 7th-8th, but uncertain if the slabs were more recent.