Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
On solar aspects, snow warmed up significantly during the day on Thursday. Below about 7,000 feet it felt like it became saturated down to the interface with the pre-storm snow on solar aspects. Above 7,000 feet, the surface warmed significantly, but the interface with the pre-storm snow was still pretty dry. I broke a new track for 4,000 feet from the valley to the summit, and had some labor intensive glopping at times, but did not hear any collapsing. I dug a pit to the pre-storm interface (40 cm) at 7,800 feet in a wind slab on a cross loaded West aspect. The pit location wasn't great for informing the most potentially unstable snowpack in the zone, but it was helpful to inform my ski route. I had mixed results - one ECT failed at ECTP14, and the other two failed at ECTN28. All failures were clean once they failed, and the failure plane was about 1" above the pre-storm crust. The snow at the failure plane was dry (even after a day of warming). I did not interpret the mixed results as indicating a need to change my plans, and I skied the gully, avoiding the starting zone. The snow had warmed up a lot, even on partially shaded NW aspects. I suspect fully shaded aspects still harbor dry snow, but even partially solar aspects will have a crust after Thursday.
Avalanche
I got a pretty good look around from the top of Crescent peak. I saw a few small debris piles on shaded aspects which presumably avalanched during the early April storm cycle. South and West aspects went through a small avalanche cycle on Thursday. It looked like the surface snow warmed up that roller balls initiated slides. Wet avalanche activity was isolated primarily to the large most solar gullies. I skied the West gully of Crescent. There was fresh debris from a wet slide that probably released earlier in the day on the Southwest aspect of the gully. It ran about 1,500 feet, stopping well before the terminus of the avalanche path.