Quick report
- Red Flags
- Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>The primary red flag is snow surface in advance of the incoming (hopefully) snow. In many places there was a widespread breakable crust above weak facets. It would easily break around your skis while trail breaking (see photo below). You could pick up parts of the crust and see facets attached to it and easily find loose facets. If this gets a load of new snow, this could create a failure plane for future avalanches. </p> <p>In more protected there was less of a crust above the old facets but there has already been enough snow and warming to create a snowpack with stronger snow above weak snow. See photo with glove below. </p>
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>Current snow surface has stronger snow above weaker facets. The stronger snow is either a weak crust or recent denser snow.</p> <p>New snow may not attach all that well to the wide variety of old snow surfaces, despite relatively warm temps.</p>
Snow was highly variable. In some sheltered places without old tracks it was soft but most other places had breakable crust or a supportable crust. This made for somewhat unpredictable turning conditions and it was necessary to ski a bit cautiously.
Due to warm temps, snow was also very sticky to both skis and skins. Despite this, the snow wasn't always all that well bonded to the underlying snow or crust.