Quick report
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Wind loading was evident, but noted no cracking, collapsing, or any significant slab problems at the low/mid elevations.</p> <p>Worth nothing that while we expected some damp snow, maybe some rollerballs, etc. on low elevation solars, the pieces didn't quite fall into place for this today. In other words, the back up plan to ski sun-softened southerlies in the afternoon didn't pan out. </p> <p>Noted no recent avalanche activity. </p>
Did some hand digging in a couple spots at low elevation and again at the mid elevation. Nothing too significant at mid elevation. Visible wind effect, but otherwise smallish surface hoar on top of right side up in the top couple feet. At low elevation, large surface hoar was found atop a fragile ~2cm sun crust, which has me on the lookout for near-surface facets. The older rain crust was 15-20cm below this with damp snow below the crust. I'll be interested to see what happens given the forecast for a another half-dozen days with minimal/no precip.
Snowpack
Mixed bag of not that great. I only checked "powder" as there must have been at least one turn of actual powder out there somewhere. Lots of wind effect was evident from a pretty wide spread event that reached farther than normal into the terrain. Sheltered mid elevation snow was hard to find as a result. Better turns were had at lower mid elevations/upper low elevations instead, owing to widespread surface hoar. Conditions were obviously calm last night as large surface was abundant throughout the low elevations and continued up as high as 7900ft (decreasing in size with increasing elevation). It was kinda interesting to see sparkly, feathery sastrugi. Unfortunately, wind-affected snow was quite hard packed and as a result the surface hoar at mid elevations didn't have enough time to soften things much. I'm sure there's still a couple soft turns in well-protected mid elevation northerlies, but it seems to be diminishing returns at this point.