East Osceola/Greeley Slide

Quick report

I was part of an AIARE 2 class that climbed and skied the prominent NE-facing slide off of the Greeley Pond trail. The slide looked skiable until a little over halfway up, where a large ice bulge ended our climb. It is passable, but not skiable. We did not go higher, so I'm not sure how the snow was above. We could ski the whole thing from where we climbed, but it was technical and should be approached as a soft ice climb. Snow on the slide showed no signs of instability. We dug a pit on a slope lower down and on a different part of the trail and found some isolated instability in the top layer of snow during the compression test, but it did not propagate during our ECT. There were layers of 1F snow between crusts most of the way through depth, with a very hard rain crust at 20cm. The slope had a northeast aspect, about 15-20 degrees in pitch, sitting at 2380'. Air temp was -12C. Compression test results were CTVQ1 at 20cm.