Burger Butte

Quick report

We enjoyed a notable uptick in ski quality and no signs of surface instabilities. Despite the general lack of alarming test results, the poor structure and facets found 1.5m or 5' below the surface kept us off from stepping out into more consequential terrain.

Weather

Air Temp

22.5deg at 7930'

Cloud Cover

broken

Wind Loading

light

Rain Elevation

Finally a low freezing level, valley bottom in AM, rising in PM

Recent Snowfall

10cm

Snow Avail For Transport

small smounts

It was a gorgeous day in the mountains, with broken skies in the AM socking into some fog around the peaks in the PM. Winds remained light, northerly all day. An inversion and a low cloud sea was visible over the Powder River valley, Baker City.

Snowpack

20-30 cm of storm snow has trickled in during the last 5 days above a crust. 10 cm of drier snow (cool temps overnight) caps 10 cms of much more dense snow, leading to very pleasant riding on right-side up new snow. Hand shears showed a strong bond between this new snow and the crust. We dug on a ENE aspect at 7930' with a height of snow 200-250cm and found a sudden planar result on small facets between a pair of melt freeze crusts (which we suspect was the culprit for the observed recent soft slabs). PST's did not indicate propagation on this layer (down 30cms), nor on facets from early december (down 140cms). See snowpilot graph for details. On a NW aspect at 7950', our partner found buried surface hoar down 50cm but no propagating results.

Avalanche

Size

D2 R1

Type

SS

Aspect

NW

Trigger

N

Elevation

8100 ft

2 soft slabs that did not propagate widely. Many loose dry D1's on southerlies.