Quick report
We enjoyed a pleasant day up Marion with fun light new snow on a stout generally supportable crust. We saw a variety of old avalanches, triggered a variety of small predictable sluffs, and giggled a whole lot. Skinning/skiing conditions were variable and mildly technical due to the stout crust. No obvious signs of instability noted aside from an unexpected propagating result in a stability test (mentioned in snowpack section)
Weather
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- 10
- Snow Avail For Transport
- moderate amounts
Despite the sun trying to peek out throughout the day, it kept snowing lightly for most of the day accumulating an additional trace of new snow (so deep right now!) with pleasant below freeing temperatures (finally) and not even a hint of wind (lovely). The sun started to poke out around 4pm!
Snowpack
We found ~10cm of new snow above stout generally supportable crusts. Before hopping in to ski we dug a pair of pits as a last minute check on our plan. The first pit (N aspect 6930' 34* slope) had a 3-4cm thick pencil hard crust yet produced an unexpected propagating result in our testing (ECTP17 @30cm below the surface) on a thin layer of preserved surface hoar and near surface facets (pictured) - which we took as a heads up to back off skiing our intended open steeper terrain. Our second pit (SE aspect 6900' 33* slope) had a 20cm thick knife-hard crust (with additional refrozen water drainage layers below) that proved nearly impenetrable in our testing (ECTN 25 @45cm below surface... and a nearly broken hand). Total snow depths for the two pits were 230cm and 205cm, respectively.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2 R3
- Type
- WS
- Count
- 2
- Aspect
- S
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 6200 ft
Our party and other parties in the vicinity triggered a variety of very predictable small loose dry sluff avalanches in the new snow that ran far due to the consistency of the crust below (L-ASc-D1-R1 x4+). We also observed a whole bunch of old debris from the warm-up loose wet and wet slab cycle (summarized in two avalanche observations).