Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Significant wind transport today, in both directions as noted in the weather summary above. Wind served to create surface wind skin in places, pack soft slabs in a bit firmer (F+ to maybe 4F), and start to create proper wind affected surface snow on exposed ridgelines (4F to 1F). Did not note significant hard windslab formation just yet, but there's plenty of AST so I'm sure it's coming.</p> <p>We've caught about 1.5" of water on Ben Lomond since Thursday, so I checked the box for heavy snowfall, but precip rates today weren't terribly intense.</p> <p>Snow underfoot and on test slopes was fairly unreactive. No collapsing, no cracking. We were able to kick off some dry loose pretty easily in mid/upper elevations above about 35 degree slope angle, running on the new/old interface. We had some "chunky sluffing" of small pieces of F hard snow breaking a couple inches thick and maybe 6 inches square at the storm interface. The only connectivity we found was a soft slab I unintentionally triggered on the new/old interface (NE 8400ft size 1.5; see separate obs https://utahavalanchecenter.org/avalanche/95074). Three other ski cuts yielded no result.</p>
Snowpack
Low elevations picked up about 4" of dense flakes and a bit of graupel mixed in. This sat atop the old wet snow surface that had perhaps a centimeter of unsupportive rain crust/refreeze on it. It skied better than I anticipated with the dense new cushioning the wet underneath, which was much more supportive than it was Thursday pre-storm.
Mid and upper elevations were pretty firm beneath the new snow, usually 1F or harder. This was either damp wind affected, dry wind affected, or wind affected with a thin melt-freeze crust, varying based on wind exposure and aspect/elevation. Atop this was a graupel layer in places, then the Thursday night rightside up, plus the Friday night rightisde up, for a total of about 10" of storm snow since Thursday. This created what was effectively upside down snow at the storm interface, though this generally wasn't a big enough difference to be felt underfoot or to affect stability.
Snow density generally increased with decreasing elevation, with the low elevation snow feeling dense and heavy. Best snow was in protected zones above about 8000ft. However, nearly all the turns were enjoyable.