Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Payed a visit to the Coal Ridge Cabin to gather some baseline for the Whitefish Range. • Started and finished the day on skis with 6-8 inches at the trailhead and 16-26 inches at upper elevations. •Measured 8 inches of recent snowfall at upper elevations. • Conducted stability tests at one upper elevation pit site that helped us identify preserved surface hoar beneath the recent snowfall. Will be keeping an eye out for this in the future to gauge presence and distribution across the region. • We enjoyed the mostly cloudy skies today with light snowfall and light winds all day. • We observed only modest amounts of wind transported snow today, yet we still found small reactive windslabs that may have formed overnight. •Three ECT tests with propagating results on a layer of surface hoar 8 inches below the surface. • Observed cracking on several thin wind slabs as we approached the last few hundred feet to ridge top . These small slabs averaged 3 inches thick.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 18
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- light
- Recent Snowfall
- 21
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
• Mostly Cloudy skies with light snowfall almost all day. • Observed several short burst of moderate snowfall (S2) at upper elevations during our tour. • Measured 0.5 inch accumulation at the truck during the day, but estimate 2-3 inches of new accumulation above 5500'. • Winds were light out of the south with moderate gusts. Seemed (sounded) a bit windier in the morning, but was mostly mellow once we reached ridgetop in the afternoon.
Snowpack
We collected detailed info from one snowpit on a southwest facing slope at 6700' • HS 49cm • 21cm of new/recent snow from the past few days. • Identified a thin layer of preserved surface hoar beneath the recent snowfall (estimated burial 11/17). This layer propagated clean and fast in three consecutive ECT tests with light-moderate force. • The basal snowpack has refrozen into an 8cm layer of 1F hard polycrystals capped by a pencil hard crust. Average snow depths at the different elevation bands: • Lower: 6-12 inches (starting the trailhead, 4400') • Middle: 12-16 inches • Upper: 16-26 inches (my high point was 7285')