Mount Emmons

Warm termperatures softend sunny terrain, creating quality turns in the middle of the day.  The shallow, but relatively dense snowpack on southerly slopes remained supportive late in the afternoon at low elevations.  Easterly and northerly slopes near the top of Red Coon remained a frozen and slick mess.  Avoiding the more concerning snowpack structure is an easy choice due to the horrible riding conditions.

We mostly toured across southerly terrain up to 12,200 feet.  Warm temperatures and some sunshine softened the surface on most slopes, except those with consistent winds.  A profile at 11,200 feet on a southeast feature showed meltwater moving through February's snowfall and draining into the melt form/ice matrix in the bottom half of the snowpack.  With just a few inches of wet surface snow and no problematic wet slab structure, this terrain appeared very low risk.  Late in the afternoon at low elevations, the snowpack remained supportive to skis and never became punchy or trapdoor.

We traversed above northerly-facing near treeline terrain and stomped around without result.  A test profile from his area produced moderate propagating test results.  The rain crust at the surface was thicker than I have observed in other places and created slide-for-life conditions on the steep terrain below.  On this particular feature, human triggered avalanches were possible, but given the thickness of the rain crust, not likely.