Quick report
While the snowpack is strong at this location, poor structure still exists and the snowpack is shallow, especially on the solar aspects. Buried treasure is abundant and not what you want to run into... Moderate winds out of the South were moving snow enough to quickly erase our tracks yet lacked the potential to build slabs. The soft snow above 7500' provided nice turns and efficient travel with ski penetration of only 5cm. Below 7500 there was a thin, breakable melt-freeze crust that skied well. We only saw minimal evidence of 2 or 3 avalanches from the last week in very steep slide paths on the NNW aspect of Bolder, all of which were barely noticeable in the D1-D1.5+ range, and partial crowns that may have initiated from loose debris from the rocks above.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 28.4
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- light
- Recent Snowfall
- None
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Mostly cloudy with SSE winds gusting in the moderate range covered our tracks and skis, and made us seek shelter from the trees on the North aspect. Temps were below freezing yet felt warm while hiking in wind-sheltered areas.
Snowpack
All three of the pits that we dug in the Shaw Twin Boulder area showed test results indicative of a strengthening snowpack. We were not able to get failures to propagate and we liked the bonding of the snow to the crusts. Under the hand lens, we inspected the snow crystals all of which show edges that are rounding.