The Pure Joy of Mountain Travel

Variable riding conditions up in McLatchie today with solar crusts, surface wind affect, and a few old tracks (only slightly) dulling the pure joy of mountain travel. We saw no new avalanches, and with only light West wind, saw no wind transport. The overcast sky kept things cool with a high of -2 at Treeline. The snowpack was relatively shallow at 140 - 160 cm at 1900 m, with just a few cm of new snow over a strong 7 cm melt-freeze crust to ridgetop on solar aspects and below 1700 m elsewhere. We had no results in snowpack tests on the “January drought” Persistant Weak Layer, which we found 50 cm down.