Steamboat & Flat Tops

Scattered clouds with light winds from the southwest and temperatures near freezing.

We found a generally shallow snowpack; on average, it was about 60 to 70cm deep, where we traveled on below treeline easterly-facing slopes. On east and northeast aspects, the upper snowpack is comprised of 20cm of rain and melt-freeze crusts with softer layers of decomposing fragments, surface hoar, and graupel sandwiched between the crusts. There are two main rain crusts: one from Christmas Day on the surface and another about 10 to 20 cm deep that formed around December 10. On a southeast-facing slope, we found a moist snowpack to the ground composed entirely of melt forms and rounds. Traveling across an east-facing slope, I notice some minor cracking and collapsing with the surface rain crust and the weaker snow immediately beneath it, although nothing was propagating further than the area around my skis. We also saw breaks in column tests below the topmost rain crust and at a melt-freeze crust between the two main rain crusts formed during the extreme wind event last week. This middle crust was not present in every pit we dug, nor was it as easily identifiable as a continuous layer in the pit wall. Below the crust from around December 10, there is a slab about 40cm thick of snow leftover from the storm the first week of December. That slab is resting on a very thin layer of facets on the ground. We got both propagating and non-propagating results in our ECTs in the basal facet layer. It seems like this layer is thin enough that it's getting broken up by surface features. The slab above is still pretty dense, and while you might see avalanches near the ground with a big enough load in a short period of time, it seems less likely than at layers higher in the snowpack near the crusts. On the northeast and east-facing slopes where we dug snowpits, we consistently got non-propagating results in ECTs at the bottom of the lowest crust. That makes me think we could see avalanches at that interface with a heavy enough load added to the surface.