Delta Lake

Toured up Glacier Gulch and past Delta Lake to check out snow conditions on a variety of aspects and elevations. Current surface conditions are a sample platter with a little bit of everything. Dry snow exists on shaded slopes all the way to the valley floor (6,600’). A 1-2 cm thick melt freeze crusts exist on solar aspects. The spatial distribution of these crusts varies with aspect and elevation. East facing crusts were thinner and seemed to disappear at around 9,500’. Crusts on southerlies are thicker and exist on exposed slopes up to and above 10,500’.

Signs of wind affected snow were present on many slopes above 10,000’. Evidence of scouring and drifting could be found in exposed terrain. Lightly textured surfaces can be found in more sheltered terrain. We found some old wind slabs in loaded areas off ridges, but they were sluggish and didn’t want to move.

We observed surprisingly little wet loose activity on south facing terrain, even on rocky slopes. There were a couple small sluffs that ran yesterday and a few pinwheels but nothing significant really. Relatively cool temperatures and a light breeze most likely kept things from heating up too much over the past few days. Today was warmer and point releases began on rocky southeast facing slopes at around 11:00am. We exited around noon, but I would expect a larger wet loose cycle to impact steep sunny slopes this afternoon.

We didn’t observe any obvious signs of instability today, however, there were many blown in crowns on steep snowfields above cliffs that likely ran during the last storm. We also observed a couple old cracks (10-20’ long) at 10,000’ in loaded areas around the skin track. Many tracks in steep places without incident.