Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>The nuking, 100 mph winds overnight, plus the much-diminished, yet strong winds today, deposited localized areas of of pre-existing and new snow onto east and southeast facing terrain. Along the summit of Peak 10,420 I found about a foot thick, dense wind slabs on downwind terrain. I jumped on some test slopes along the ridge and found the wind deposits to be stubborn, slabby and sometimes cracky but I could not get any of it to pop out as a slab. The wind slabs were mostly just along the ridges and we got out of them very quickly as we descended the east side of 10,420 where we could easily see the hundreds of old snowmobile and ski tracks from the previous week under 2 inches of new snow. The avalanche danger was mostly low to moderate where I was with a caution to avoid any steep slope with recent wind deposits, which were easy to see and feel from their smooth, rounded shape and slabby, hollow feel. I'm guessing they will settle out fairly quickly.</p>
Snowpack
There was only a dusting of about 2 inches of new snow on top of a wide variety of previous snow surfaces--sun crusts on anything sun exposed, wind blasted in upper elevation wind exposed terrain, still some soft, settled powder on straight north facing slopes at mid and upper elevations. These north facing slopes skied OK except that, typical of the Wasatch, after a week without snow, everything was completely tracked up with both ski and snowmobile tracks. We skied a run off the east side dodging perhaps hundreds of old snowmobile and ski tracks, then a couple runs on the north facing trees that also had a surprising number of previous tracks. The upper elevations got heavily blasted by the west and northwest winds overnight creating big snow whales everywhere heavily peppered with copious amounts of fir needles and branches. You had to get well down off the ridges to find some semblance of skiable soft, settled powder in between old tracks and trees. Not a great day for turning but at least it was cold and windy. It was actually a pretty day to be out.