Quick report
Skied the East face of Gibbs today, and found a wide variety of surfaces, as many others have, over the last few weeks. Mainly traveled on a NE slope from 12500’ to about 10k, and mostly found several types of wind affected surfaces. The majority were fully supportable, with faceting occurring at the surface. In places, a thin wind skin overlies the facets, and the skin would break off in small plates. At the uppermost elevations, on a wide open slope, sastrugi was the predominant surface, intermixed with very firm wind board. Despite the cloud cover, we didn’t experience any significant green housing, and the snow surface didn’t show any signs of warming on the northern half of the compass. On the skier’s left wall, which tilts ESE, a melt-freeze crust existed. This was about 5-8 cm thick, and mostly supportable. Cloud cover all day today, prevented this from breaking down to any appreciable degree. The lower angle apron, which faces almost due E, had softened during the day, and on our descent in the afternoon, presented a three dimensional, textured, broken down melt-freeze surface several inches deep. Down low on the FS road and along creek bottoms, large surface hoar existed, on the range of 10 mm. Some remained upright even as we exited around 3:30 pm. We didn’t find this grain type or its remnants anywhere else however.