East Side

Did a sled access tour on the east side of the highway via the Big Y drainage. Nice sunny morning with light winds but clouds rolled in quicker then expected in the afternoon and the south wind picked up at ridge top. The snowfall in the last week has really filled things up especially at treeline and in the highway valley. Once we got deeper in the Big Y drainage we found a much shallower and wind swept snowpack which is often the cases over there. North facing glaciers at the end or the valley were holding some nice powder with some minor wind effect on top. Overall average snowpack for this time of the year in this area. There was about about 10 15cm new snow from Sunday. Below this the big snowfall from last week has settle a lot and got windpressed (4F to fist) in most places except in sheltered areas. Some deeper deposit and wind slabs were observed on steeper rolls. We didn't investigate the bond between this wind deposited layer and surface below but on the slopes we traveled snow density appear mainly uniform with no evident weaker layers. We saw a small size 1 natural avalanche from the snow from Sunday, around 1900m north facing, 20 cm depth, 20m wide and 40m long. No other sign of avalanche from the last big storm cycle. Although our confidence in stability increased as the day progressed we didn't feel we had enough information to commit to bigger slopes.