Quick report
After a few days of light snowfall mixed with warming temperatures and greenhouse conditions, significant wet loose avalanche activity might have been on a hiatus on Saturday. Sunny slopes definitely warmed. You could push some wet snow around on steep slopes and maybe even trigger wet loose on the right slope. But naturals seemed limited to a few upper elevation areas that didn't warm much over the last few days. The upper-elevation slab avalanche problem in this area has likely started to heal with warm temperatures, but evidence of large natural slabs triggered by cornice shedding, loose snow avalanches, or icefall suggests suspect layering is still present, if isolated in distribution.
No active signs of instability other than being able to trigger pinwheels and very small wet loose on steep, sheltered sun-exposed terrain features (gully walls, etc).Weather
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- none
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
Classic spring day with sun and mild temperatures. Intermittent high clouds didn't have much of an effect today, but light to moderate south ridgeline winds seemed to keep excessive warming in check.
Snowpack
Observed a 4cm of surface crust staying firm and ski - but not boot - supportable on steep northerlies. Any slope seeing direct sun was soft and sticky. Below, 8cm of moist 1F over another, thinner crust, and then about 15cm of more moist 1F. On a northerly wind-loaded slope, April 1st interface of 2mm DF down 30cm - CTM-RP. Knife-hard March 24th crust down 75cm. Solars had shallower layers of crust, and P new snow over the March 24th crust down 45cm.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2.5
- Type
- SS
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- NW
- Trigger
- NC
- Elevation
- 6400 ft
Dozens of wet loose on all aspects at lower and middle elevations, human-triggered and natural. Most were D1 in size, but a few were larger. Most notable were large slabs on both the north and south sides of Shuksan.