Seattle Ridge

Poor visibility and a severely wind-damaged surface made it tricky to get to the top of the ridge today. We waited about an hour for good enough visibility to get to the top, and never made it further than the top of the uptrack. The wind dunes were impressive, some of which were up to 3' deep and none of which were easy to see in the flat light.

We were really limited in what we could see, but we saw a large new avalanche in lower Common Bowl on Tincan, fresh debris in one of the gullies on the front side of Seattle Ridge, and a large crown on the northwest side of Orca, above Virgin Creek back in Girdwood.

We dug two pits at about 1650' while we were waiting for the clouds to lift and found alternating layers of storm snow and loose melt forms in the upper 3' of the snowpack. All of which were loose and unconsolidated, and they look like they will quickly become unstable with warm temperatures and clear skies over the weekend.

We saw one large avalanche across the highway on Tincan, down low on the looker's left side of Common Bowl near CFR. This looked like a large slab avalanche failing within the recent storm snow.

We dug two pits at about 1650' while we were waiting for the clouds to lift and found alternating layers of storm snow and loose melt forms in the upper 3' of the snowpack. All of which were loose and unconsolidated, and they look like they will quickly become unstable with warm temperatures and clear skies over the weekend.

The total depth of the snowpack was 6' at 1650' elevation. We did not find the 2/14 buried surface hoar layer in these pits. We did not get any unstable test results, but the upper snowpack was basically just either new snow or weak, mushy melt forms.