Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
You could really see the wind impacts from the past several days. With winds flipping from E to W we found wind slabs on both sides of the ridge and easily triggered shooting cracks in wind-affected snow. Even though most of the slabs we saw were small, it didn't take much effort to make them fail.
Below all the recent snow, not much has changed. The facets are still weak and still there... Could they produce an avalanche? Maybe. At least some snowpack tests suggest so.
We triggered short (3-10ft) shooting cracks in wind loaded pillows near ridgeline. Despite our best efforts none of these turned into small avalanches.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Rain Elevation
- 0
- Recent Snowfall
- Trace
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Overcast skies with a cloud ceiling around 5500ft. This meant we were in the clouds on the summit and didn't get too many views. Temperatures were still cold, but not as frigid as recently. Winds had shifted to the W and were lightly drifting snow, however, most of the wind affect we found was from a the significant E wind event on Wednesday and Thursday.
Snowpack
Wind: The biggest news in the snowpack was the obvious wind effect in any open and exposed slope. Strong E winds over the past few days scoured some slopes down to an older crust, formed very firm hollow (but thin) wind slabs, and loaded some unusual aspects. By today, winds had switched back to the west. We actually found wind slabs on both sides of the same ridgeline. NEarly every small wind loaded feature we touched produce a shooting crack. Some of them were more impressive. Despite all the cracking, we weren't able to cause any small avalanches. Maybe we needed steeper slopes or unsupported terrain. Either way, it was all we needed to convince us not to toy with the wind slab problem.
Persistent Slab: We were also very interested to see how the snowpack has changed over the past few days in this area. In short... it hasn't. The weak sugar facets are still there and snowpack tests continue to fail. There's still been a notable lack of avalanches in the East Central zone on these older snow layers, but it's still an unsettling snowpack. Propagation Saw Tests have given us the most consistent results during this particular persistent slab issue. Today's test fell right in the mix with the others (NE, 5700ft, PST 40/100 End, CT22 SC)
These weak grains are pretty easy to spot. They certainly aren't hiding. It just takes a bit of digging (and sawing) to see them fail.
Avalanche
We saw one very thin and small wind slab avalanche right below the north summit (SE, 5900ft). This looked more like a shallow crust that had failed and slid.