Valley of Sin

We toured up the Valley of Sin to see how northerly aspects have held up and what kind of activity skiers have been encountering. What we found resembled a ski area with hundreds of tracks from 4068' back through the end of the valley. Overall it looked as if skiers had encountered very little instabilities with no slabs triggered and only a small amount of sluffing on steeper slopes. We found a sliver of untracked snow in the back of the valley to sample and found nice soft faceted surfaces and no propagation in our test pit. We observed a party ski a solar aspect off the back of Halibut tail and although their turns weren't throwing up much snow it didn't look to be too negatively affected by the sun or warmth. We observed a number of naturally triggered Persistent Slabs on the north aspect of Government Peak and one near Womens't Run that all appeared to have released around this time last week. Outside of some small point releases on westerly aspects of 4068' we didn't observe any new activity.

We traveled through mostly northerly aspects where we encountered soft, dry, faceted surfaces. On ridgelines, sun crusts and exposed firm surfaces were more evident. Dipping our toes into solar aspects revealed softer snow, but it was still not enough to be considered wet. We dug on a NE slope at about 4000' where some surface wind effect was evident. Despite this and the presence of an older buried slab, stability tests yielded no propagation. A number of old persistent slabs were observed on the north aspect of Government Peak and one adjacent to the Women's Run (see photos), some small, isolated point releases were observed out of rocks on westerly aspects of 4068'.