Quick report
We stopped by the Mammoth Mountain Beacon Park to practice our rescue skills before leaving the resort take stock of the entire season's snowpack.
- We saw no signs of instability.
- We traveled over variable surfaces (see snowpack section).
- It was another beautiful day on the East Side!
Weather
- Air Temp
- 40s and 50s
- Cloud Cover
- scattered
- Wind Loading
- light
- Rain Elevation
- NA
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Cloud cover decreased earlier than forecast, going from mostly cloudy to partly cloudy by mid-morning. Light to moderate southwest winds occasionally caused small areas of light blowing snow.
Snowpack
We found a deep, strong snowpack on northeast and northwest aspects near treeline.
- Snow depths were over 2 meters
- The New Year's Crust is buried at least 80 cm deep. We found no persistent weak grains around this crust.
- The early-season depth hoar buried by the Christmas storm is still at the bottom of the snowpack. The grains were moist, rounding, and, gaining strength (4 Finger hardness).
- Decreasing cloud cover and winds kept the surface on northerly aspects dry. Wind-protected areas had 10 cm of soft (F hard) near-surface facets (1.5-2mm).
The surface snow on sunny aspects was wet midday, but not unstable.
- The top 25 cm of the snowpack consisted of moist-to-wet melt forms that have been through over a week of the melt-freeze cycle.
- Under that, the snowpack was dry where we looked on south-southeast around 10,000 ft.