Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
- Collapsing
- specific
Experienced some cracking and whumphing in specific, previously wind-exposed or leeward areas where slabs had been built back in November. Dug a test pit at 4,100 in a previously wind loaded WNW aspect gully feature. Despite being stubborn, we gotclean propogation (ECTP28) in our test pit, 40cm down on a density break in old wind slabs on some .5mm faceted snow grains. At the bottom of that midpack layer are about 10cm of well-developed, large facets above the ground.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 30
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 2,400'
- Recent Snowfall
- 8
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Broken skies, near freezing temps (30*F). Felt "warm" with some solar input through the clouds on the uptrack. No precip today.
Snowpack
The pass received a small amount of snow (about 3" or 8cm) on the 2nd (see photo of IM road). This storm came in warm and tapered with graupel on the surface. This was NOT enough to avoid a scrapy, rocky uptrack through the rocks to Microdot shoulder. This new, denser snow is helping our shallow, loose, faceted, sugary snowpack though! Despite the challenges in elevations between 3,000 and 4,000', we found about 400' of 85-150cm of snow in a tighter feature on the NW side of Microdot shoulder. Note that the chutes on Rae Wallace across the way still look pretty chicken scratchy (see photo). This previously wind-loaded area appeared to have begun the process of faceting and loosening, though we did find some 1F old slab. While poor, our current, meager snowpack structure has had a lot of time to adjust, the small amount of snow we do have is still vulnerable to blowing around: strong winds will have the ability to build new slabs over this weak setup.