Mushroom

This was an off duty sunset tour to look for recent wet snow activity and to get a sense for how much melting has been occurring. 

The only cracking I observed was in flat areas at sunset where a 2-3cm thick crust had formed at the surface and was actively re-freezing when I encountered it. As I skied through this I could hear and see these fresh crust plates cracking and spiderwebbing. Very cool, not an indication of stability/instability.

No formal obs, just moving and probing and hand pitting and looking. 

Cool temps, steady northerly winds, and lots of previous wind effect have prevented natural wet snow problems from turning on in this area. Based on how the snow felt on S-SW-W aspects at sunset, it would have been possible (during the heat of the day) to push small wet loose slides in steep terrain in many locations, but these would have been unlikely to become large. I could see one dribble in Dry Canyon that became a larger slide and then picked off a wind slab as it descended. This was a D1.5, but is a good preview of the type of activity we may see with significant additional warming/melting. 

The snowpack in alpine terrain in this fx zone (Pios -> White Clouds -> Boulders) has been worked over by the wind, eliminating the easy pickings for wet loose slides. Low and middle elevation terrain has been somewhat less winded, but the effects are still apparent.

The Boulders and Pioneers experienced an impressive, widespread wet slab cycle at the end of January during a single hot and calm day. This warm-up has been more gradual and has been tempered by the winds, but similar large slab avalanches failing due to slab properties changing/melt-water wetting weak layers/etc. may be in the cards as the warm-up deepens.