Quick report
Facets! Facets here, facets there, facets everywhere. It made for fun skiing, but I think it may make for some questionable stability in the future. Time will tell...
Weather
- Air Temp
- 41 at the TH, 24 at 5300'
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
The skies were clear in the morning, and a band of high clouds moved in in the afternoon. The temperature difference from lower to middle elevations was significant. It was well above freezing at the truck and well below where I dug my pit. The wind was calm with some light gusts at ridgeline from the southwest.
Snowpack
A quick hand pit around 3200 ft on a south aspect revealed faceted snow to the ground interspersed by random little ice layers. Any other snow that was in a shady spot felt similarly faceted. I observed a lot of surface hoar, but it actually wasn't quite as widespread as I was anticipating. There were a lot of areas where the surface was capped by an ultra-thin melt-freeze crust. There didn't seem to be much consistency as to where this crust was found. The south side of the Tronsen Ridge revealed a thick melt-freeze crust at the surface, with facets below. As I skied down on the north side, I experienced a decent amount of dry loose sluffing in weak faceted snow. Yet the next set of turns would be on a super stiff and icy wind packed surface.
I dug a pit on a northeast aspect at 5266 feet. The depth of this pit was 51in/130cm. I found facets to the ground, with a few crusts interspersed here and there. All but one of the crusts was faceting away. The only one not faceting away was more of an ice lense. I performed a compression test and got a hard, sudden planar result on the first crust buried 20in/50cm below the softest facets (CT27, SP). I performed an extended column test and got no results (ECTX).