Bullion Basin

Today we took a walk up Bullion to see how Tuesday's rain affected the surfaces and if any new snow had fallen as temperatures started to cool at the tail end of the storm. 

We found maybe a cm or two of new snow above roughly 6200'. Elsewhere, firm, irregular surfaces were the name of the game. It was just soft enough of the surface to dig your ski edge into to skin, but it was a bumpy ski down and the out-track was semi-terrifying.

There are open holes, many with running water, and obvious significant snow loss. At least two new trees are down across the Bullion Basin trail that were not there when I made a similar trip last Monday (3/16).

Coverage on East Peak is dwindling fast with large areas of bare ground and discontinuous snow coverage. Along the ridge to Crown Point, there are pockets of bare ground, and skiing down into Pickhandle Basin doesn't look possible in many locations. 

Cornices are extremely trimmed back, and we observed some more recent wet avalanche activity in Union Basin, possibly from Tuesday.

No instability observed

The snowpack consists of a roughly 10" (26cm) thick knife-hard crust starting at or just barely below the surface. Below that, you'll find mostly 4F meltforms that range from moist to wet.

After cutting through the crust, we were able to get propagating results on an older interface down 34cm from the surface (8cm below the crust). ECTP21 and ECTP23.