Greater Incline Peak area

We traveled the greater Incline Peak area today. Driving up the Mount Rose Hwy we saw some very small wet loose instabilities that had ran the day before. We saw no new wet loose instabilities that had occurred today. Snow was melting off of trees, but air temps stayed below freezing.

New surface hoar formed last night on the snow surface was observed to persist upright today on NW-N-NE-E aspects. The small, lighter wind snowfall event for tomorrow has the potential to bury this new SH and create a new layer of concern.

We went to some upper elevation N aspect terrain and checked in on the Jan 2 PWL and the basal facets. Snowpit test results indicated strength gains since our last visit to this area on Jan 18. Concern remains for lingering, isolated instability in these layers at a regional  scale.

We triggered a few small to medium size collapses in an isolated area of particularly shallow snowpack on a NW aspect at about 9,600'. The snowpack in this location was a slab over weak basal facets, early season style.

We triggered 3 collapses on a single section of slope, NW aspect, 9,640', near treeline terrain. Two collapses were small, less than 6 feet in diameter, the largest collapse was about 40 feet in diameter. Shallow snowpack area with HS around 80 cm. 1F slab of F+ hard basal facets.

We dug our snowpit adjacent to one of our previous pits from Jan 18 to compare the test results. Jan 2 PWL of buried surface hoar (SH) and the basal facets both appear to be gaining strength in this area.

New SH on the snow surface observed across all aspects in this area today above about 9,000'. On southerly aspects up to our highpoint of travel at 9,700', the SH had fallen over due to warming with some developing sun crust noted. On the NW-N-NE-E aspects that we traveled this afternoon, SH was still upright and intact. SH increased in size from about 5mm at 9,100' to 6 to 8 mm at 9,600'.