Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
- Collapsing
- isolated
It's still pretty thin out there but getting better. We were able to ascend the Phantom entirely on skins...never thought that would be a noteworthy point in March lol. Greenhouse got the snow by the end of the day. Good to see the snow piling up though! In the morning (before 10A) we got ~2 whumpfs on uptrack around the clearing at 5200'. No cracking was associated with the whumpfs and they were in lower angle terrain. On uptrack of south face Snoqualmie, got some cracking on kick turns in thinner areas near rocks and around craggy ridges, but other than that not much cracking.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Recent Snowfall
- 25
Overcast and cloudy all day. Greenhousing began around 10A.
Snowpack
When we started in the morning at approx 8A the snow at pass level was 2-3 inches of colder snow on a denser, wet interface. Around 4000' in the Phantom Trees the new snow depth increased to around 5-6 inches; then at 5200' clearing new snow depth increased to 10-13 inches. We dug a pit in the 5200' south facing clearing: found F hardness down 5-7 inches, progressing to 4F down to 13 inches below surface. A strong melt-freeze interface was present below the surface snow. We performed two column tests and got CT11 down 5-7 inches at the recent storm interface. Fracture was not sudden, nor planar. We were able to get the column to break at the crust interface after clearing the snow above the fracture line and giving it one hit from the elbow. Fracture was non sudden but planar. We did not notice any obvious persistent grain types in our pit, but we also did not have a loupe. Slot couloir was 5-6 inches of sluffy dry snow on a soft crust; we did not get any slab to fracture on a belayed ski cut and the couloir mostly just sluffed. Similar with Snot. As the day progressed, the snow got greenhoused and significantly heavier and wetter. Around 11A we started to notice rollerballing on northern aspects. Thunder basin beneath the Slot seemed a few degrees warmer than back on the south side of Snoqualmie Mountain...maybe some easterly flow impact? By the end of the day there was a noticeable wetting of the surface snowpack on all aspects and all elevation bands that we observed. The best snow that remained was polar aspects above 5000': i.e. the top of the Snot and Slot Couloirs. Once below the constrictions on either of those couloirs, the snow was significantly wetter.