Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
- Collapsing
- specific
We headed to Sunburst today for the first day of our Pro 2 course. The storm from the previous 2 days had moved on and deposited a total of 7" (0.4"water) of snow at the Turnagain Pass SNOTEL. We found 3" of new snow at the parking lot and increasingly more as we climbed. It was a little hard to tell how much new snow was from the most recent storm because there was 11" of new snow last week. We noticed some red flags as we stepped off the main skin track into some wild or less traveled snow to the north of the main skin track. There were small shooting cracks and several collapses or whumpfs consistently until we reached our pit location at 2,000'. These were failing on the facets below the crust about 12" down. We dug several snowpits at 2,000' and got unstable results (ECTP7, down 33cm on facets between a crust sandwich, PST15/100 End on same layer). There were several layers of facets and crust below the most unstable layer that reacted in our tests. We did not see any new avalanches in the Turnagain Pass area. Once we stepped off the main skin track into some wild snow we began noticing small shooting cracks. One larger shooting crack occurred just below 2,000' as we approached alder line. We also noticed collapsing as we left the main skin track. We had several smaller collapses including one that occurred on the skin track. There was one larger collapse in an area closer to 2,000' that had slightly more wind effect.
Weather
It was clear and cold (-4F) by the time we got to the parking lot at 12:30pm, but some skiers told us it had been windy in the alpine earlier in the day. There was a light southerly breeze at 2,000' where we were digging pits. We noticed some flagging off the south peaks of Seattle Ridge from a north wind around 3pm.