Quick report
- Red Flags
- Heavy Snowfall
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>the snow was plentiful and light enough that there's no doubt in wind-affected areas slab development could have happened. And we did both see and have some longish-running sloughs. But these were easily managed. It's little hard to tell from this pic, but there is a sluff in front of me that was initiated from the cornice at the ridge above. The "deposition" was about a foot deep. </p>
Aspect made a pretty noticeable difference today; the south facing terrain with a stouter, slicker crust seemed to sluff more easily, but it was still generally easy to manage. North and east aspects took a bit more pitch to sluff. That said, we avoided the most exposed and steeper stuff in the zone that we were in; the skiing was fast enough that lower angled terrain skied well without pushing up the slope angles and exposure to bigger, more connected slopes. I think that a day/night of settlement will tighten things up a lot and sluffing will cease, at least until the snow disintegrates again with time if we don't get much more.
Snowpack
about 8-10" down through medium-density snow there was a layer of graupel, but it didn't really lie on a hard surface, and since there wasn't much of a slab formed (see note about little wind above) it was all pretty loose/uncohesive.