Quick report
The breadth of the glide avalanches is impressive. Otherwise, we experienced no red flags. It appears some of our weak layers are gaining strength during this period of warm weather, but the overall structure is still concerning.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 2500
- Recent Snowfall
- 2
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
34f at the truck with mostly calm winds. Mostly cloudy with some quick shots of sun and some quick snow showers.
Snowpack
We dug a pit at 3100' on a west facing slope on the south side of the sunburst ridge. This was not the best pit location due to tracks prior to the most recent snow, but we were most interested in looking at the snowpack structure. The top 120 cm of snow was right-side up going from fist to pencil hard. There were three layers of buried surface hoar down 60cm, 70cm, 90cm respectively. In our tests we had a ct17 and an ectp27 both down 60 on small 2mm bsh mixed in with facets. Neither of the failures showed much energy. We suspect that the warm temps and time are promoting stability in these layers, however 3 layers of bsh in the top meter of the snowpack does not inspire confidence.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Aspect
- W
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 2500 ft
Numerous glide releases over the past few days and countless cracks opening on many of the slopes we passed between girdwood and the sunburst parking lot.