North Lake

We traveled to the North Lake area to return to a location that held exceptionally poor structure prior to our week without an overnight freeze. Our goals were to continue investigating free meltwater in the snowpack and to see how the snowpack has changed.

We found a lack of propagation in a propagation saw test focused on 2/10. Meltwater has percolated down through buried weak layers and has saturated our entire pack, and hardness is increasing in rounding facets. Generally, we found a stabilizing trend in saturated, buried weak layers on northerly aspects at middle elevations.

We found deep, wet snow on southerly aspects at mid- and low-elevations after 12:00 pm.

On a northwest aspect at ~9500', we found the height of snow to be 105cm. Some notes:

• The upper 30cm had refrozen overnight into a thick, pencil-hard, supportable melt freeze crust. This crust capped moist, 4F, rounding facets from 2/10. An old decomposing crust from 1/1 was 70cm down. The entire lower snowpack was moist and predominantly 4F in hardness.
• Meltwater had drained past buried weak layers to the ground.
• Weak layers are becoming increasingly indiscernible.
• We found a lack of propagation in a propagation saw test. PSTend 95/100 down 30cm on 2/10. 

We hopped into a hasty hole nearby on a north-facing aspect and found similar conditions. The height of snow was 120cm, and beneath the refrozen upper 30cm melt-freeze crust, the entire lower snowpack was moist.