Dirtyface

It was a nice sunny day, that felt hot in the sun.

We have turned a corner into spring weather and wet avalanche concerns. The warm temps are pushing the snowpack into a rapid change, which usually leads to avalanche concerns. The upper snowpack is moist, with water beginning to move through the snowpack and pool in weaker layers of snow. Other than a few small wet loose avalanches, we didn't see any signs of instability. However, the snow was very wet and heavy for skiing and we pushed a few very large rollerballs.

We saw a few wet loose avalanches off steep rocks and cliffs in the sun.

We dug a full profile on an eastern aspect to check out how the snowpack is handling the warm sunny weather. The snow surface was wet and slushy, with a thin crust down a few centimeters. The upper snowpack is mostly moist rounded grains interspersed with melt-freeze crusts.  A thicker crust from February 24th is down 70cm and the Early February Crust (EFC) is down 80cm. There is still weaker snow over the EFC, but the grains are moist and mostly rounded. An extended column test (ECT) did not produce any results.

The most notable snowpack observation was the amount of liquid water that began moving through the pack after we excavated the snowpit. We observed water pooling in the weaker snow over the crust and were able to slide the ECT block off easily on this layer of pooled water.