Elephant's Hump

The snowpack at Elephant's Hump is exhibiting a lot of variation. Northerly slopes have a combination of mostly wind-blown hard snow, breakable crust and some shallow soft snow; the snowpack on these slopes is relatively deep. In contrast, southerly slopes have shallow soft wet snow. On the way down, any time the local slope became even slightly greater than 30 degrees,  there was a small slide of the surface crust, between 1-4 cm in thickness. At the top, one such slide produced slabs the size of kitchen cabinet doors. But most released slabs the size of small dishes, and none produced anything that could knock over a person.  The wind slab problem exists, albeit exhibiting in small ways today. The persistent slab problem was present in my snowpit and tests but in an inconsistent manner. Today was notable, however, in the number of observed avalanches -- small and large.

The snowpack is relatively deep at Elephant's Hump with HS at 195 cm in my snowpit location at 8500 ft on a NE aspect. The near surface layer is a melt-freeze crust on top of a rain crust 1 cm down. On northerly slopes, there is wind-blown hard snow, breakable crust, and shallow soft snow in some treed areas. On the southerly aspects, the snow was soft and progressively getting wetter during my time there between 11 am and 3 pm. I found about seven layers in my snowpit, which was 115 cm down from the surface. But snowpack tests were somewhat inconclusive. One of two compression tests failed with a sudden collapse on a faceted layer 105 cm down, but there were no results on the other. A Deep Tap Test produced no results.