Weather
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- 2000
- Recent Snowfall
- 7
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Obscured skies until 2p, then becoming broken to scattered. Light snow intensified from 1-3p w periods of S2 snowfall. Winds were mostly calm, picking up in the afternoon with a few moderate NW gusts at 7,000ft. Rain/snow line is a rough estimate with precip staying all snow in Mazama and some snow falling as low as Twisp.
Snowpack
Height of snow:
5,000ft- 120-150cm
6,800ft- 150-220cm
New snow: 7cm
Below the new snow, old surfaces show slight signs of recent warming; two faint crusts are ↓7cm buried on 1/24 and ↓18cm likely buried on 1/21. Some upper elevation slopes have stiffer, old wind-drifted slabs 20-35cm below the surface. On southerly aspects and below 3,600ft, surface crusts are more stout from sun and light, low elevation rain, respectively. At a profile site around 6,800ft, WNW (HS 150cm), we saw moderate but planar and clean shovel tilt tests on the two sub-surface crusts.
The middle snowpack is made up of fairly consistent, thick layers of snow from storms between January 8th and 17th. The hardness generally increases with depth. At upper elevations, stiff, older wind-drifted slabs can be found within the middle snowpack. At the above-mentioned profile site, we found propagating test results (ECTP 28) on small (0.3-0.5mm) facets on the January 8th interface 65cm below the surface. See profile graph in images.
The lower snowpack is an amalgamation of December melt forms that have undergone various degrees of faceting. The specific layers (Dec 30th and early Dec crusts) were barely perceptible at our profile site. In places, the defined layers fully dissipated in the greater mass of coarse, grainy melt forms. Snowpack tests were mixed with some hard, sudden results (CTM (SC) ↓105cm under the Dec 30th crust.
Avalanche
New avalanches today were loose dry and "spindrifts" from cliffs. On two adjacent steep convexities WNW, 6,375ft, we triggered a shallow D1 loose avalanche in today's storm snow, as well as some crack that broke through a subsurface crust into blocks and displaced a foot but didn't slide.