Off the Mt Rose HIghway

We toured up from the Galena Forest development, going up the highway and then hitting the knob at 7200 across from Sunridge. We noticed a lot of deep cracks as we skinned, but the largest ones were were the new snow fell on brush, creating air spaces. We dug a quick pit off the knob at about 7200' on a protected north facing slope. Total snow depth was 175cm with 95cm of new snow on top of a soft crust. We were surprised with the results of our compression test, so we repeated it. And got the same results. On the first tap there was subtle failure at 15cm. On the third tap there was another failure at 35 cm. Finally we had a very noticeable failure at 70cm. All of these failures were within the new snow.

Quick report