Observation: Emigration Canyon

Another day of overcast skies, obscured at times, then giving way to sunshine and rapid warming when the clouds periodically broke beginning around 1:30.

5 inches of low density powder on north aspects; thicker, heavier and thinner new snow cover on south and west.

Winds light all day, and no transport observed.

Skiing was today was a grab bag of conditions. The northern wind-protected terrain remains stellar, and the snow where we were was solid and bonded well on that aspect. A But south was an entirely different story. New snow hasn't bonded well on the melt-freeze crust. It posed slick challenges on the uptrack in places, especially in steeper terrain. Kind of like churning through cream cheese on highly exposed and wind-scoured southern aspects, where the crust was just crispy enough to get an edge in, so turns were still decent. Managed to find one southern aspect that seemed to escape some of the worst wind and greenhousing effects, and it offered the best run of the day, probably because it was also untouched. (pic below)

Regardless of the aspect today, when the sun came out, the snow was almost instantly denser.

Mark White did an excellent job of describing conditions in the northern periphery of the Wasatch today.