Incline Lake Peak

The storm gave a fresh coating of white to this area, but some of the previously exposed rocks and other obstacles have already started melting back out on sunny slopes.

We saw snow blowing off of the ridges on Incline Lake Peak and on Relay Peak this morning. On the summit ridge of Incline Lake Peak we found some drifts of newly wind-blown snow and areas of exposed dirt on the SW side and some cornices left over from the SW winds during the storm on the NE side. Our ski kicks and snowpit tests on the newly formed wind-slabs on the SW side did not produce unstable results. Previous skiers had kicked some cornice pieces onto the slope below on the NE side, but those oven to refridgerator cornice peices did not trigger any cracking or other signs of instabilty in the slopes below them either. 

After that we moved over to the SE aspects to investigate how much they had warmed up. As of noon, the sun crusts on these slopes remained firm, and we did not see signs of unstable wet snow. This may have changed later in the day after more sun and warming.

Varible but mostly supportable snow surfaces existed depending on aspect, elevation, and sun/wind exposure. Wind-sheltered, shady north aspects held a few inches of soft cold snow on top of dense supportable storm snow. Sunny slopes all had varing degrees of supportable sun crust. They had just started to soften in some of the sunniest spots by that time.