Craigie Cr./Dogsled Pass
Quick report
Few people had ridden out past Dogsled outside the forecast area. The snowpack showed signs of December drought and our most recent 10 day+lull in between snow events: Solar and windward (south/southeast) aspects are showing wear and tear with rocks and snow less than 65cm. Norths are hanging in there with about 80-115cm of snow at upper elevations, but there are still a lot of early-season obstacles like rocks and vegetation.
It has not snowed since 1/26 and we are in a phase of relative stability. We have benefited from not having noteworthy midpack weak layers. However, poor structure at the bottom of our snowpack means even in areas with more snow, you could still find a shallow slab over an extremely weak base at upper elevations OR an old wind slab over faceted snow grains at upper elevations in steep and extreme terrain.
No new signs of instability observed today. The largest natural avalanche we saw was the D2 natural persistent slab avalanche in the back of Willow Creek from 1/27-1/28. No recent natural or human-triggered avalanches in the Willow side of the forecast area or out of the boundary on the Craigie side.Weather
- Air Temp
- 29
- Cloud Cover
- few
- Wind Loading
- none
- Rain Elevation
- N/O
- Recent Snowfall
- NO
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Bluebird day out there with clear skies and few clouds to the south and west. Warm temperatures in the upper 20s felt above freezing in the sunshine. The February sun had no noticeable impact on snow surfaces on solar aspects today. Winds were calm to light out of the east.
Snowpack
Snow surfaces were supportable with soft faceted, wind texture. While coverage remains thin (plenty of willows and alders still out there), the riding was surprisingly pleasant with easy traction and enough coverage for maneuverability around rocks.
Solar aspects harbored a thin, breakable crust (less than 1cm) about a foot down. On norths, we were able to intermittently detect a frozen fog or rain crust at about 6-8". In areas we could find it, it was faceting and crumbly, with no noticeble weak-layer fracture plane in hand pits.
We dug on a north aspect at about 4,200' in a previously wind-loaded gully with a height of snow of 115cm. The upper snowpack was faceted and there was a thin, crumbling crust about a foot down. Below that, we found a rightside-up midpack from fist to pencil hard. Below that, there remains 20cm of clumpy and chained depth hoar to the ground. We got ECTX (no propagation in extended column tests) twice in this location.