Quick report
I did not encounter any sensitive wind slabs. It seems quite unlikely that you'd trigger an avalanche on a buried weak layer where the pack is uniformly thick and strong.
No obvious signs of instability. No significant cracking in the wind skin found along a ridge line.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- No more than 1 cm today by 1430.
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Overcast skies. Very light S---1 near the Baker Parking Lot and on the drive to and from Hailey. S1 while at the head of Apollo. Snow showers appeared to be generally clinging to upper elevations. Very light SW wind was not moving appreciable amounts of snow.
Snowpack
Surfaces:
It was lightly snowing today, but accumulations were only around 1 cm (by 1430). I found 18 cm of settled new snow on shaded, upper elevation slopes since 3/23, which seemed well bonded. On sunny slopes, it's been baked into the mega crust from the mid-March warm-up. There were some thin, sunny margins where Saturday's snow was capped with a crust. This will make a DF/MFcr layer cake that could be interesting when loaded.
Sunny Slopes:
All sunny slopes up to 9,700' had a formidable and supportive surface crust, and avalanches seemed very unlikely.
Shaded Slopes:
Snowpack depths ranged from ~150-185 cm. February weak layers were unreactive in snowpack tests and generally looked good here. The (1/6) and (11/30) layers were buried >130 cm deep and were not directly observed. It seems quite unlikely that you'd trigger an avalanche where the pack is as uniformly thick and strong as where I observed (see photo).
Avalanche
There were a few D1 loose snow avalanches in the E-facing bowl at the head of Apollo that likely occurred during the mid-March warm spell.