Quick report
- Cracking
- widespread
Went out for the layup ski day at Spider! We found temps hovering around freezing and wet snow falling (S1) to ~5000'. By the time the snow showers shut off around 11am, 6" of new snow had accumulated above yesterday's wet supportable surface. We observed localized cracking only within the storm snow. We observed obscured cloud cover (basically walking in a cloud from the car), at or just below freezing temperatures with light variable winds and light wet snowfall throughout the morning. If you like it damp, today was a good day to get out. We also dug a quickish pit at 6500' to take a peek at the the supportable but not too hard (1F) moist old snow surface and recently buried equinox crust. Our pit was at 6500' on a WNW 35* slope with a total snow depth of 220cm. Test results: - ECTP13@185cm on a 8cm thick layer of F+ wet polycrystals below the equinox crust - PST50/100 END @ 125cm in the wet facet sandwich just above the Feb 3rd crust complex and just below another sneaker crust. The propagating results on surprisingly weak snow below the equinox crust were a bit touchier than we expected so we reeled back our terrain choices and opted to ski the ridge/skin track line out. Thankfully the skiing was good up high and soft surfy turns were enjoyed before rallying back through the mudslide/creek chaos back to the trailhead.
Avalanche
We easily and predictably triggered a variety of very small storm slab avalanches (2-6" thick) on slopes >30* from 4900' on up to 6600' and these were composed of overnight/morning snow running on the old wet surface snow.