South Fork of Eagle River

We went into today wanting to get a sense of what the snowpack consisted of at upper elevations in the Chugach State Park. With a series of significant winds events during the past few weeks and no new precipitation, the evidence of strong winds was visible throughout ridgelines and gullies. Most ridgelines were scoured and surfaces at higher elevations were a mix of bare ground and knife hard wind board. Middle elevations were a mix of breakable and unbreakable wind-affected snow which made for challenging travel.  We zig zaged our way down a gully where we noticed variable snow on either side.  We dug a snowpit on Harp Mountain around 4050' on a NW aspect to target a wind-loaded start zone. There was 75 cm of snow at this location but many other areas nearby were scoured to the ground.  In the pit we saw a cemented knife hard wind pack with about 1 to 2 mm of facets at the base, with pockets of smaller, 0.5 to 1 mm near-surface facets forming on the surface. We could not get an ECT cord through the knife hard wind layer in our snowpit location, so we figured it would be challenging for the force of a human to impact the thin layer of facets at the base of the snowpack.