Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
- Collapsing
- isolated
Off duty bop. I went into the day with a range of options, and ended up nixing all of my more ambitious plans due to sensitivity of recent slabs and amount of active loading. I settled on my most conservative option. I quickly traveled through the runouts of large avalanche paths, and was pretty selective about the starting zone terrain I was willing to enter.
I experienced subtle, easy to trigger cracking in the new snow, even on relatively sheltered slopes. Cracks extended a maximum of 2m. I experienced a few subtle collapses where the wind had built stiffer drifts.Weather
Leaving Smiley around 1200, there was 1-2cm accumulation. Mix of sun and S2 precip on the drive north. No snow visible in trees until around Redfish. White Clouds were significantly more socked in than the Sawtooths at this point in the day. Tour WX (1245-2100): snowing more often than not. Alternating waves of partly cloudy skies and intense snowfall. Estimated max precip rate around S5-6, but this was not sustained. Snow since 3/10: 5-6cm at highway, 10-12cm at 6500', 20-22 cm at 7,500', 25-30cm at 8,500', by 9,500' there was way too much wind transport to get an accurate sense for HST. By nightfall, there were 3-4cm of rime accumulated on the WSW side of trees and rocks at upper elevations.
Snowpack
No formal observations, just moving through the terrain and taking it all in. I did some probing along the way, finding snow depths of around 190-210cm at 7500' and 240-260cm at 8500'. The wind was doing a great job of moving snow around, but it wasn't the most constructive/steady loading. The amount of new and wind-transported snow had me traveling fairly conservatively.
3/10 weak layer: Crusts on solars are variable, dependant on aspect and slope angle. On steep S-SW these are supportable, thick, and icy. On margins (SE, WSW) they become breakable, but are still icy and friable. Here, small facets are easily made out above and below the crust. Based on observations during formation of this surface (3/6-3/10) these are likely radiation recrystallization crusts. On shaded slopes a few batches of SH developed here on 3/6 and 3/7, and widespread near-surface faceting was observed. Based on the reactivity of today's slabs, we have another weak layer to be concerned with. It looks like we won't put enough water on this for it to become a problem in sheltered terrain. The upcoming warm-up and meltdown will likely erase most of the evidence that this layer existed.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2.5
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- E
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 9000 ft
I observed a handful of small slabs that had released during the day (D1-D1.5). These failed on many aspects, but seemed to have a preference for solars where they sat on a crust+fc combo. I watched a small D2 release naturally while I was eating an orange, it was awesome. Was just staring at a start zone and the crown appeared, magic.