Return of Mugatu

<p>Today we went to Silvern Lakes and found 15cm new snow! It was snowing all day with moderate westerly winds. We saw some snow being transported by the wind but we didn’t see any shooting cracks or other obvious signs of wind slab forming. This meant we were pretty happy to practice some sled skills on a small but steep slope. We saw no new avalanches. We dug on a NW aspect at 1550m. The 15cm new snow overlies a firm old surface. We didn’t produce any propagating Extended Column Test (ECT) results but the column did fail at 20cm and 30cm deep on buried weak layers (ECT N 8 down 20cm on buried surface hoar, ECT N 27 down 30cm on a thin layer of melt forms). We found the other persistent weak layer (PWL) that we’ve been observing (Jan 7 Facets) 60cm deep but it did not produce any results today. It’s still a layer we are watching as one negative result certainly doesn’t mean it’s gone away!</p>

Terrain Ridden

Convex slopes, Mellow slopes, Open trees, Steep slopes.

Snow Conditions

Powder.

Weather Conditions

Stormy.