Quick report
We toured in the Elephants Hump area today to look at the snowpack before our next storm system arrives this evening. Snow surface melt freeze crusts existed on all aspects and elevations that we traveled on today. These crusts were mostly ski supportable at around 1-2'' thick, but in some areas were softer or breakable crusts. Winds were strong on our tour with gale force winds up to 60mph along the upper ridge of Elephants Hump. Travel was smooth and mostly edgeable on untracked slopes with refrozen tracks more unforgiving.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
Gale force SW winds along the upper ridge of Elephants Hump. Increasing cloud cover with some sun breaks throughout the day.
Snowpack
We dug in 2 areas today. The first one was near 8500' on a North aspect in a rocky area with a shallow snowpack of 92cm-see attached snowpit. Most of the snowpack tests found no results, a PST test did show that propagation could be possible in the future if failure was to occur on the basal facet weak layer. Another snowpit at just above 8800' showed a stronger snowpack with HS=120cm. Snowpack tests at this location showed no unstable test results.