Palace butte

Skied up to palace butte today, and experienced a veritable cornucopia of difficult to ski conditions. The snow was thin slop until we started getting blasted by wind at 8600’, and from then on it was deeper but highly variable, with conditions changing every few ski lengths and wind loading and scouring that was very difficult to predict. Some snow was quite supportive, some was rotten, some had a lovely breakable crust—it would take numerous snow pits to make me feel like I had a representative picture of the snowpack. We did experience one large, loud collapse near the top of palace butte, but did not observe any recent avalanches. Fortunately the skiing is so bad that the allure of avalanche terrain is quite low.

Quick report