Helen Lake

Today, we made our way onto the upper mountain of Mount Shasta to look for warming instabilities, and to assess upper elevation climbing conditions. The upper mountain is looking excellent in terms of climbing, and Lake Helen is in great shape. There are still tons of heavily wind effected surfaces that are slowly breaking down with the sun effect. No signs of avalanche activity or instability were observed. Though temperatures were far above freezing, and skies were clear, surfaces didn't soften much deeper than a few inches. It may take another day of warm conditions for the snow to destabilize. Shaded aspects are still very firm. While at Lake Helen, we witnessed two climbers fall and slide approximately 800ft down from the Heart. Both were uninjured, but this is a good indicator of just slick the surfaces are up there.

Snow surfaces were firmer than expected this morning, but it didn't take long for low elevation slopes to become soft and saturated. Upper elevation slopes, however, took far longer to soften. Even by mid-afternoon, many solar aspects had only soften by the top few inches. This could be due to how wind compressed many slopes are from the recent extreme northerly winds.