The Lip

We hiked from Hermit Lake into Tuckerman Ravine into Chicken Rock Gully. The simple objective today was to look for any new, small wind slab formation. Boot penetration on our hike ranged from 1 to 10cm from just over an inch of new snow recorded on the summit. We observed wind textured snow in start zones, the floor of the ravine and the lower snowfields. Across the bowl, several inches of wind transported snow blanketed the hard old snow surface and was just starting to exhibit slab-like behavior in hand sheers but was mainly unconsolidated. 

Digging a quick pit, we found a weaker one finger hard layer sandwiched between pencil hard slabs. The grains in this thin layer appeared to be decomposing precip particles. A weak layer to keep an eye on but unlikely for a skier to affect it with the stout old slab sitting on top of it in this particular location.

On our hike back down to hermit lake we were able to get some isolated cracking under foot in wind dirfted snow and saw continued evidense of light wind loading. The potential for finding small, thin, isolated wind slab pockets today was not out of the question. 

We dug a quick pit to assess snowpack structure on a SE Aspect at 4500ft between above old debris and about 100ft below the week old crown lines. Due to time constraints, we were unable to do any formal stability tests.