Quick report
I traveled in the Incline Peak area today with the goal of assessing wet snow instability on solar aspects and searching for smooth melt form turns. My original tour plan was to link the SE face of Peak 9773 with the SE face of Incline Peak. With the current uncertainty surrounding reactivity of old buried persistent grains, I decided to tow a probe while ascending the steep E facing approach slope on Peak 9773 to assure I continued to travel on a deep and uniform snowpack. Depths on the bottom quarter of this slope were consistently 290cm. As I ascended toward the middle, I started to see depths decrease about 10cm every 10 feet. At about the mid-point of the slope I made the personal decision to turn around and exercise patient decision making as a solo skier. While descending the SE face of Incline Peak at 1200 I was able to initiate D0.5 wet loose sluffs and rollers in the top 1-2.5 inches of the surface snow with ski cuts and off-fall-line turns in steeper sections of the terrain. Overall, these were quite manageable and I was pleasantly surprised with how consistently supportive the upper snowpack was on this feature. During my exit back to the car I observed a D1 wet loose avalanche in steeper, rockier SE facing terrain. Small wet loose sluffing and roller balls in steeper solar exposed terrain.
Weather
- Air Temp
- High 30's to Mid 40's F
- Cloud Cover
- few
Warm day with above freezing temperatures at all elevations traveled.
Snowpack
Hasty observations: variable surface conditions observed in sheltered and shaded terrain including colder wintry snow (DF and FC), warming wet snow, thin surface crusts, wet and frozen tree bombs, and old tracks. Probed snow depths above 9000 feet along my route on N - E facing terrain varied between approximately 290cm - 230cm. Probed depth at 8200 feet on a SE aspect was 196cm, although scoured areas on this windward slope were much shallower with sections of exposed shrubs.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1 R1
- Type
- WL
- Aspect
- SE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 8700 ft
WL-N-D1-R1-S