Quick report
No signs of instability observed
Weather
- Air Temp
- 26
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Beautiful day- Light winds, broken clouds, sun peaking in and out all day.
Snowpack
The snow on the top 12 inches of the snowpack is still soft but beginning to settle and form into a slab. It's still easy to travel through, but I anticipate it will continue to become firmer over the next couple of days. The soft slab on the surface sits on a firm, 10 cm thick rain crust. I found the interface between the soft slab (SS) and the rain crust to be resistant to failure. During testing, it only failed under firm taps (22,23). The soft slab didn't easily fail on the rain crust, but this interface is worth monitoring. It's close enough to the surface that facet growth on top of the rain crust is a distinct possibility, which could make the soft slab more reactive and susceptible to failure.
Below the stout rain crust at 130 cm (ground to 130 cm), I found 3 distinct hard slabs interspersed with disintegrating rain crusts. We’ll continue to monitor this portion of the snowpack, but I didn’t observe any failures in the lower portion during compression tests. The lower part of the snowpack has become firmer and gained strength over the past two weeks.