Quick report
- Red Flags
- Cracking, Collapsing, Poor Snowpack Structure
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>The very weak sugary faceted snow can be found on most north through east facing slopes and is easily located beneath a variety of crusts and other layers. A good shot of snow with some water weight could create some interesting avalanche conditions. </p>
1. Not much new snow yet with only a couple inches this morning and was basically dust on crust and did not improve riding conditions all that much.
2. On this east facing slope around 10,000' the couple inches new snow is sitting on a stout crust with the very weak sugar snow underneath that. Not sure how much weight this crust will take before it fails and breaks into the the faceted snow.
3. There was some impressive trenching from sleds as they rode through faceted snow.
I did have one good collapse with this piece of snow cracking out above me and it did not slide because of the low slope angle. There are a few places where the slab is connected just enough to overload the weak snow underneath.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>I was finding the weak sugary snow from the long dry spell on most aspects that I traveled today and it would sure feel like a rising avalanche danger with some new snow and wind. </p>
The two to three inches of new snow did not improve conditions very much, it basically put dust on crust. There are a lot of old hard tracks out there and we could sure use a good shot of snow. The avalanche conditions did not change much today, there was little wind where I traveled and I did not observe the new snow being blown around creating any wind issues.