Boney Beadnell

<p>We traveled to the high point of the road network on Mt Beadnell today on sleds, not even slightly tempted to enter cutblocks, which have poor coverage. Looking around we saw lots of small rollerballs and pinwheels from recent daytime warming, but only one small wet loose release. At 1380m, beneath a thin crust of melted and refrozen surface hoar, we found only a 95 cm-deep snowpack in a somewhat loaded spot. The bottom 50 cm or so is still variably occupied by ground roughness like rocks, stumps and logs. (Of course many stumps are still standing proud, well over the height of the snowpack.) Although the overall thinness of the snowpack is probably its most notable feature, we had some interesting snowpack test results too. These were a resistant shear beneath 30 cm of our most recent snow (from last Friday) as well as a sudden shear down about 55 cm on a layer of preserved 4mm surface hoar crystals. Both were found in the first few hard taps of our compression test. The surface hoar sat above a few cm of snow that was lower density than the storm snow above and below it. The bottom 10 cm of the snowpack was composed of moist, faceted crystals made very uneven by ground roughness. Definitely not the Island snowpack we know and love! Feels more like the Rockies. Seems like the current weaknesses would be most problematic where the snowpack has formed over smooth ground.</p>

Snow Conditions

Powder.

Weather Conditions

Sunny.