Thunder Snow

Went out for a little adventure to Ridge 2000 from the ski resort today. The day was off to a rough start skiing down Cedar Bowl getting hammered with a snow rain mix…snain, and slapped our skins on in the pouring snain at the haul back while we contemplated our choices in adventure. Just as we started skinning we experienced some thunder snow, and hoped that the convective cell would pass quickly. It did. By time we made it to the bottom of Fish Bowl it was getting sunny and the adventure was looking more promising. We crossed the bottom of the bowl as we gawked up at the sunlight ridge with slightly clenched sphincters noticing old wet loose avalanches and a couple large glide cracks. We climbed up the ridge on 5-10cm of wet shmoopy snow and as we climbed the wind got stronger and stronger. We noticed that the previously unfrozen surface snow was beginning to form a cream brulé crust on anything but the most solar aspects. As we neared the top of the ridge I was slowly getting strangled by my own jacket as my hood parachuted backwards with my face to the wind which was honking from the NW. Deciding that we didn’t want to get blown into the Cement Chutes, we decided to call it there and made a plan to descend the ridge avoiding any terrain below the glide cracks we observed earlier. We had great visibility of the terrain below us and could confirm that no other parties were around so we decided to shmoopalanche the slope and ski the bed surface which produced reactive wet loose and provided really great skiing on the bed surface. As we descended we noticed that the snow became less reactive and a very interesting snow surface (see pic). As we exited fish bowl back to the resort we observed new wet loose avalanches around the glide crack and that the glide crack itself was noticeably larger than earlier. Overall it was a great adventure packed with all kinds of weather from thunder snow to sun and honking wind. **we also observed several trees failing in the wind today especially in the BTL, heads up hockey out there.