Core Lodge

Beautiful day for a ride through the willows to ring in the new year! Total snowpack was sitting around 113cm. Warmer temps varied from -0.5 to -4 throughout our tour with light winds (SW+NE; swirling in the valley) and overcast skies. We had good visibility as the cloud cover remained high. No new avalanches were observed. We ventured from valley bottom to tree line, and did not make it into Alpine (stuck to relatively low elevation; approx. 900-1400m). At 1350m in an open meadow with large trees (and willows need we mention) on a NE aspect, we found a melt freeze crust down 26cm with buried hoar frost (4-6mm in size) down at 29cm. We are not sure if this is a wide spread or isolated distribution of the surface hoar. We found that the Nov 24th melt freeze crust is starting to break down and bond with other interfaces. We noted a large temp gradient while doing observations. We conducted an extended column test and observed a fracture that did not propagate. ECTN 26 found at melt freeze crust sitting above surface hoar.