Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
My god, what a day! Father Winter returned in force. Trees are absolutely covered in snow. Big flakes fell throughout much of the day (a good 6-7" on my car when we returned), and the forest above Milepost 15 is filling in nicely (finally). Of the four times we were on the saddle between Angeles and King Dome the winds were strong only two of them. When they were strong they seemed to be coming out of the WSW and were definitely blowing snow sideways. The snow is deep, deep enough to make most of Super Bowl too low incline to do anything other than straightline it. Silverback and Southwest Glades were an absolute delight to ski, and diffuse sun even peeked out a couple times. One of the best, if not the best, riding days of my season thus far. Last thing to add, we didn't dig a pit, but we found an interesting data point in the Milepost 15 trees: a pillow with a very helpful profile of the recent snowpack (see pic): fist on top, then four finger, to maaaaybe one-finger above the very stout and obvious crust (3/4 or earlier? not sure). The horizontal line in the pic is the crust. Mostly isolated/specific cracking and rider-initiated loose dry slides in what appeared to be this week's storm snow. Overall the conditions seemed to match the forecast quite well. Despite cracking/sliding in the storm snow nothing felt touchy and raised our hackles at all. There's just a lot of snow out there, and the winds are definitely blowing things around and likely creating some stiffness in the top few inches of the storm snow, but the winds were not blowing consistently throughout the day.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
Snowy and windy but emphasis on snowy not windy, if that makes any sense. It felt like real and enjoyable storm skiing.
Snowpack
Overall it feels like right-side up storm snow over a firm crust (not that we could feel the crust in our turns--for the most part they felt bottomless). The first cracking we encountered was on a kick turn during our first ascent on a SE aspect at 5100' (see pic). Then we experienced little half moon cracking/collapsing on the uphill side of our skin track (see pic). Neither were very big. We witnessed no instabilities during our two runs on the west facing slopes of Angeles other than observing what looked like a partially collapsed cornice below the entrance to the Ramp on Angeles. At the top of our run in Super Bowl we tested a small cornice-like feature to see if it would budge, and it didn't, but when I dropped in following my partner I was able to initiate a dry loose with a bit of cracking on my first turn on a steeper part of the slope (North aspect, I believe) but nothing further that run. Then on our exit on a steep, open SE aspect the first of two riders triggered two separate cracks which initiated dry loose slides (see pics of crowns). See avalanche summary for further detail.
Avalanche
On our descent back to the road on a SE aspect, the first of two riders triggered two separate loose dry slides that initiated from cracking that occurred on his turns. The crowns look scary (see pics), but interestingly neither propagated very far (not much beyond the picture frame) so even though they occurred within two turns of each other they were clearly separate slides that did not connect. Also noteworthy, they did not appear to step down or pick up much additional snow but rather appeared to be dry loose slides within the storm snow. As my partner commented, they almost seemed "predictable," not because we were witnessing extensive cracking, whumpfing (none all day), or natural slides but simply because the storm snow is so deep. We were hip-deep in our turns on that final descent, and each turn we were moving a lot of snow.