Quick report
Spruce juice, tree pee, whatever you call it, we were in it today:
- Light to moderate mixed precipation. The exact mix varied throughout our tour.
- The snow surface was wet on southerly slopes and moist on shaded aspects.
- Natural and human triggered rollerballs were running below 6000'.
- We found the 12/7 crust down 12-18 inches and of variable hardness (see snowpack).
- Large and small column test yeilded stable results in our test pits.
The travel was generally sticky but still enjoyable for a soaker day.
Natural and triggered rollerballs, mostly below 6000 feet.Weather
- Air Temp
- 32
- Cloud Cover
- obscured
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 6000
- Recent Snowfall
- 3
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
Soggy. Light-Mod precip from mid morning to mid afternoon. Mostly mixed, though mixed means a few snowflakes tagging along with rain. Rain line about 6000 feet, though bounced up and down a few hundred feet. Light winds.
Snowpack
Wet snow surface. On solar slopes, a rain-softened sun crust made for predictable turns. Gooey on shaded slopes.
Test profiles at on SE (6200 ft; HS 70 cm) and NE (6500 ft; HS 110). 12/7 melt-freeze sandwich down 30-45 cm. The bread is pencil hard ice layers; the filling is softer (4F-1F), refrozen grains, and includes a degrading layer of weak snow near the top or bottom of the filling. No propagation in ECTs, though we could pry off blocks and produce clean shears.
Avalanche
We were not able to trigger wet loose slides with ski cuts on a steep slope at ~5900 ft.