Quick report
Photo showing snowpack structure of strong, wind-drifted snow over softwer/weaker snow.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>We focused field work on areas with recent wind-drifted snow. On a northwest aspect at 8,700', there was a dense 30-45 cm slab of strong, 1F-Pencil hard wind0-drifted snow underneath the recent storm snow from the past few days. This wind drift likely formed during Friday's strong wind event. ECTP21 failing down 35 cms on a layer of softer, 4F snow underneath the wind slab. We repeated the ECT - as well as a few compression tests - and got repeated failures in the weaker layer at 21 taps.</p> <p> </p> <p>Although the softer snow is not a persistent weak layer and therefore it should gain strength fairly soon, we kept our travel to lower-angled slopes given this structure of strong over weak, recent avalanching in wind-drifted snow, and full propagation with extended column tests.</p> <p> </p>
The top 5-15 cms of the snow surface consists of dense graupel and rimed stellars. Some greenhousing meant for damp snow at low elevations by noon.