Quick report
- Red Flags
- Recent Avalanches, Heavy Snowfall, Wind Loading, Cracking
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Red flags lead to cautious travel today. Cracking in the new snow on the density inversion, cracking of cornices farther back than usual, heavy snowfall and wind loading were all taken into account in todays travels.</p>
The trail to Reynolds ended abruptly at Dog Lake today, beyond there trail braking was shin deep with a inverted feeling to the snow. The plan was to get up on Reynolds Peak to see what was happening on a steeper wind loaded slope, there was one shallow soft slab in skiers right corner pocket of Reynolds looked to be cornice triggered, leaving debris in the more N facing pine trees. Dropped a couple cornices on E facing Reynolds with no real results except obvious cracking on the slope but no movement. Pretty much a white out on top of the peak most of the day with heavy wind loading on the main NE face. Tried to get a couple steep test slopes to release but I don't think they had the wind load that Main Reynolds had and were not reactive to prodding. Dug a quick hand pit on N facing Reynolds and found a rain crust about 16 inches down, could not isolate a column in this area with a clean shear below the rain crust.
Photos: cornice drops with no results on E facing Reynolds, sensitive cornice lines, snow pit with a clean shear under a thin rain crust. Snowing hard up high, and lots of new graupel on the way out. Spraying graupel on lower angle worked fine today.
If the wind and snow amounts decrease as forecasted, and some settlement considerable seems about right tomorrow, if the wind continues to blow and we receive more snow all bets are off and I'd stick with high.
Snowpack
Once again hard to tell how much new snow because of wind transport but looked like about 7 or 8 at the trail head increasing to a foot plus on Reynolds Peak, todays snow was most mostly graupel maybe 5 inches during the day, resting on lighter density snow from last night, causing a bit of an inverted feeling while skiing and trail breaking, I would think this inversion will settle out quickly.