Durrance

Two main themes out there; new snow and old snow. The old snow (December drought snow) can make enormous avalanches. It is armored by a stiff slab in many places and impacting it with our weight is becoming slightly more difficult, but the consequences of doing so would be severe. The new snow can produce a range of smaller avalanche issues (loose snow avalanches, small wind slabs) in addition to the larger issue of 1-1.5 foot thick slabs failing at the new/old interface.

We experienced just a few collapses. These sounded fairly deep and muffled, but did not propagate very far from where they were initiated. There was no visible cracking associated with these collapses.

There was a 2-3 cm dusting of new snow overnight at valley bottom, sitting on top of a solar MFcr that formed on Thursday morning. This roughly doubled as we climbed to our high point at 9,800'. At highway level, the new snow from the past week has cooked down to a roughly 15-20 cm thick package of new snow with some crusts. As you climb, the amount of settled newer snow increases significantly. At 9,000' there are roughly 40-50 cm of settled storm snow. There are a few density changes within this new snow, but nothing glaringly obvious as a potentially longer-lived weak layer.

Continuing to monitor 2/1 (the interface at the base of the recent series of storms). This interface formed during a period of sputtery precipitation (with precip falling as rain up to 10,000') followed by a trio of very bright, warm, sunny days. In some places there doesn't seem to be much going on here, but in others this interface has a pairing of crusts+facets that can make avalanches. We did not look at it today, but I know that we have some upper elevation rain crusts with associated facets that could behave in similar ways. This layer is worth paying attention to, even a relatively small slide that fails on this could break hundreds of feet wide and run quickly downslope.