Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
New snow instabilities depend on a number of factors, but overall: heightened avalanche conditions exist with intermediate yet steady snowfall and winds. Assess and evaluate the conditions, terrain and your routes; or simply step back from avalanche terrain temporarily to give the new snow time to stabilize.
Little wind effect, but where we found it we could provoke cracking in the surface and even triggered a couple of small pockets near ridgelines. These did not travel far due to the smallness of the slope.Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Recent Snowfall
- 10 - 15cm
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Low elevation rain turned to snow around 4000 ft. Light snowfall tapered off in the afternoon. Winds were clam and we had decent across valley visibility.
Snowpack
As we traveled up Trestle creek, the overnight rain/snow line was around 4000 ft. New 24 hour snowfall, dense and heavy, depths increased as we gained elevation finding 10-15cm (~4-6in) of new snow. nearAt 5500 ft we observed a trend from upside down storm snow (heavier denser over lighter softer snow) to right side up new storm snow at 6500 ft. We noted previous wind drifts, ridgeline wind lips, and cornice formation but no wind effect in the overnight new snow. At this elevation the near right side up snowpack on a North aspect Column Tests showed easy force sudden results on the new storm interface down 15 cm (CT2 SC, CT2, ECTN3 - down 15cm from surface). While traveling on ridgetop, isolated cracking was occurring on various interfaces (on the previous soft snow or crusts) that the new snow sits on. Below the new snow we observed about 15cm of storm snow from last Sunday, March 9th, storm that favored this area along the ID/MT state line. 4F to 1F hard snow is found below with stubborn test results (CT22, ECT23 40cm down from surface). The 2/23 Rain crust (K hard, 5cm thick) is 80cm below surface in this location.