Observation: Red Baldy

Went up White pine to the top of Red Baldy today, not much wind down in the drainage but as soon as I started breaking trail up Red Baldy I got in the wind zone. The wind was blowing almost in the high category when I reached the top, it had scoured the top 100ft of snow off the NW face down to the old snow surface making it slick and not friendly skinning. The wind was blowing across the face of Red Baldy cross loading terrain features. I skied the center chute but put in some ski cuts in the top fearing it might be cross loaded the only results I got were a sluff running most of the distance of the upper chute but not running fast or packing much of a punch. Buy the time I skied it and hung out for a minute my tracks had been erased, the wind was increasing and the cloud deck was dropping, I decided I was probably lucky to get away with one as wind slabs were forming rapidly and called it a day. I would think with increased wind speeds and denser snow landing on lighter density snow from the weekend the hazard will increase dramatically tomorrow.

Photos: sluffing from a ski cut in the upper chute, cloud deck dropping around 1:30pm and my tracks that got erased by the wind in about 15 minutes

The new snow on Red Baldy has settled out to about 9 inches of medium density creamy powder, there was some wind skin and wind slabs forming in wind exposed terrain, melt freeze crust on all S facing aspects and all aspects at lower elevation.