Sheltered Solar Stillness

First day this season for the field team in the Haines Summit area, ahead of the first forecast this weekend. We headed to the South face of Nadahini to stay out of the howling outflow winds, and were very pleased to find it was calm on that side:) Despite the -20 °C temperatures, it was sunny and pleasant! In flatter, sheltered areas at low elevation we found 5-15 cm of soft snow on top of hard wind-pressed surfaces and buried wind ribs. As we travelled higher, it got harder to find pockets of soft snow. We eventually gave up on trying to stomp our edges into the hard slab, ripped our skins, and as we descended back to the sleds, the snow got softer and the turns got better. We saw lots of evidence of old avalanches, but no recent avalanches, and very little blowing snow on ridgetops (but lots of blowing snow in the highway corridor!). We dug on south and east aspects around 1400 m and found a generally dense, strong snowpack with no layers that are currently concerning. Snow depths where we probed were 250-300 cm, which is shallow for this time of year at Haines Summit, but coverage is still pretty good.