Fast Forster

We rolled into town at the start of a trip with just enough time to get up to Forster Cabin. We started familiarizing ourselves with the local snowpack and played around in the meadows a little bit. It was snowing and blowing the whole time we were up there. When we looked up to the ridges around us, we could see the wind moving the new snow, and knocking it off the trees, so we were happy to stay out avalanche terrain today. Not a very exciting report, but the riding in the meadows was fun, 10-25 of soft new snow was sitting on top of old, supportive snow and tracks. The wind was blowing across the meadow and smoothing out the surface and filling in our tracks. If we had been on anything other than flat terrain, we definitely would have been watching out for reactive windslabs.

Around 1100 meters a surface crust that formed on January 15th was 4 cm thick but easily breakable. As we gained elevation, the crust got thinner and was no longer present above 1400 m. Dug a quick pit on a protected slope near the edge of the meadow. Compression tests produced only broken results in the top 30 cm of soft snow, nothing very concerning there. The mid snowpack was right side up and generally strong. The early December crust/facet combination was down 103 cm, and was 2 cm thick, with loose, sugary crystals on top. The lower snowpack contained several other crust/facet layers.