Bring ski crampons

alpineadam , Saturday 23rd March, 2024 12:45PM

Very little new snow at Cold Foot. Some small pockets of wind deposition. Only 1-3cm of snow in sheltered areas. Definitely not consistent with the amount of snow in Fernie or Sparwood from Thursday's storm. Evidence of many natural avalanches from the last warm event in steep sunny terrain of various sizes. Very hard melt freeze crust in the upper snowpack that started to break down later in the afternoon. Ski crampons would have been very useful.

Failure layer had a distinctive layer of graupel however the snowpack above was somewhat moist so hard to tell what it was comprised of. Likely some faceting around the graupel layer. Snowpack was extremely complex with many independent melt freeze layers. 3 pencil to knife MF layers down 80 - 90cm with 4F density in between them. A good portion of the upper snowpack was moist under the hard 20cm crust.