Lunch Peak

We continue to observe signs of unstable snow such as rumbling collapses and easy propagating failures in tests. Still, the lack of natural activity visible is concerning and leads to assume many places are sitting there waiting for an extra trigger. Today's warm up will place a thin sun crust on sunny slopes but shady aspects remain dry and cold.

We targeted lower elevation slopes to evaluate the Valentine's Day interface now that it's buried under a 2 to 3 foot thick slab. Approaching a northeast-facing opening around 5,200 feet, we observed a loud rumbling collapse. Tests confirmed the poor structure but we are unsure which surface hoar layer contributed to the collapse. We suspect it was the V-Day layer since it did not produce results in tests. There was another surface hoar layer deeper (which is odd based on this elevation and recent rains) and that one did not disapoint. We observed propagating failures with isolation and easy force in the 1/28 surface hoar. Those feathers remain surprisingly large - 15 mm. Our second pit hovered around 5,500 feet and was south-facing. Similar to our first pit, we found both surface hoar layers but they were much more broken down/ disturbed. Only the 1/28 layer produced sudden collapse results and ECTXs in both surface hoar layers. The most notable results in our south-facing pit was subtle storm failures in the drier snow below the moist surface snow. Surface wetting was only a couple of cm's deep.