Quick report
Lots of roller balls, loose wet on open slopes. In general, most constrictions (couloirs/chutes) ran naturally in the warm up on 1/22 and nearly all rocky features have shed too. Lots of avalanche debris everywhere. Lots of loose wet on the climb up the S Face. While telemetry was reporting fairly low temperatures (at least below freezing), the snowpack was very heavy and saturated. Kind of felt like there was warm air aloft then rain was cooling as it fell. The snowpack had a thin veneer of rain/water on the top and drier snow was present below. On steeper convexities there was more cohesion of the snow into small wet slabs. It was very easy to generate large roller balls and generally wet chunks while skiing down the south side. On the north side in the Slot the snow was drier from 6k to 5k, although below 5k stuff got pretty wet and chunky. Skiing down out of the Slot exit to the Thunder Basin below the Snow there was lots of roller ball activity. The snowpack is definitely upside-down and saturated. Slot ran naturally, pretty much full width with a 12-14 in crown near the top. See avalanche details separate in the obs.
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- moderate
- Recent Snowfall
- 12
Overcast and actively snowing/precipitating from 12-3PM today. Not very windy except for ridgelines. Precip was odd, almost felt like freezing rain above 5k. Was not stellar snowflakes but rather a mix between graupel and ice balls/freezing rain pellets.
Snowpack
Snowpack was drier below 4k but very upside down starting at 5100' in the open on the S Face. The temperatures seemed to be warming throughout the day. We reached the 5100' clearing around 1PM and noticed a thin layer of rain/water saturating the top layer of snow, with maybe 4-5 inches of drier snow underneath.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2 R3
- Type
- SS
- Aspect
- N
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 6000 ft
Slot ran naturally, 12-14 inch crown, full-width and near full slide path. Large debris pile in the run-out zone below Circus.