Quick report
- Cracking
- Observed
- Collapsing
- Observed
Most of the tour was quiet as we were traveling in thick forest. We saw obvious instability when we neared a few targeted terrain features.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- moderate
- Recent Snowfall
- 10 to 15
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
There was about 4" of new snow in the valley bottom at 10:30am. Closer to 6" at 11,500ft. Snowing on and off through the day, heavy at times. Probably about 2-3" of new snow while we were out. It is still snowing this evening, so hopefully, a little more adds up. We stopped short of climbing into the blowing snow above the Pencil. Strong winds were audible and there was clearly blowing snow once you were out of the trees.
Snowpack
There is no question that the steep avalanche terrain holds weak, faceted snow as most of that terrain avalanched back during the Thanksgiving event, sat shallow for the following month, developing into large-grained facets. However, we observed a quiet snowpack on most of our tour while traveling on the ridge and trees above, up to the Wang Chung. This has been a personal worry about how conditions would develop after the Thanksgiving events. The total snow depth above the avalanche terrain is 110 to 150cm on average and notably stronger than the shallow snowpack that exists in the avalanche terrain. We didn't travel through any of those shallower bed surfaces and stayed in the safe terrain above.
The rime crust was isolated in this area. Again, we mostly traveled in the trees. We poked into a couple of the recent crowns, and the weak layer of those avalanches was the large-grained facets (~2mm, fist hard) that had formed since Thanksgiving, and slabs were about 45 cm thick (F+), with thicker and harder crowns in wind loaded features.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Type
- SS
- Count
- 7
- Aspect
- NE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 11600 ft
Several large natural avalanches ran this morning in 2nd Bowl, Quill, and Pencil, judging by the amount of snow on those bed surfaces. The avalanche on Wang Chung was visible yesterday, and the rime crust was in the new snow over the bed surface so that one ran earlier. We also triggered a large avalanche in 2nd bowl while walking on the ridge above.