Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
- Collapsing
- isolated
We experienced roughly half a dozen collapses that felt like they were occurring on the 1/6 interface. More of these occurred on the second pass up the skin track than on the first. Half of these were localized, and half traveled at least 100 feet, shaking snow off of medium-sized trees. Most of these did not have visible associated cracking, but one pronounced collapse that resulted in a sensible drop of the snowpack resulted in some cracking with visible vertical displacement.
Weather
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Low and mid-level clouds hanging to the mountains for a few hours in the morning, with skies becoming largely clear by late morning. Calm winds in the morning, becoming light out of the N/NE by early afternoon. Not sure how much this increase in wind speed was just a reflection of changing elevation.
Snowpack
The day stayed cool. We heated up/melted surfaces on a relatively narrow wedge of the compass from SE-S-SW. Observed some radiation recrystallization crusts building on solar margins. We are building a good little weak layer for the mid-week storm that is forecast to arrive Wednesday.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Type
- HS
- Count
- 3
- Aspect
- NW
- Elevation
- 9700 ft
We had a great view of the very large avalanche that failed naturally in the NW bowl of Galena Peak as well as the smaller slide in the SW bowl. A relatively fresh slab that appeared to fail on1/6 was visible at the Headwaters Drainage. We could also see a number of loose snow avalanches with a wet character debris in the southern Sawtooths and across the street in the Pole Creek drainage. There was apparently relatively fresh debris below the W side of Abe's, but I couldn't see the associated crown. The debris looked like it had lots of hard, dense chunks in it.