June Backcountry - Up And Over And Up And Over

We wanted to track the thaw, so we gave it the old up-and-over, and up-and-back over in the June Backcountry.

We started on a northwest aspect, descended a south-facing slope with patchy coverage, ascended another north-facing slope, and wrapped around to the east. We climbed higher and wrapped back around to the north, which we descended before climbing back up the mostly bare southerly slopes, and finally dropped our first northwest aspect to the parking lot.

• Northerly surfaces were hard and frozen in the morning, and just thawing as we descended true north at noon. Northerly slopes were slushy as we made our final descent around 1:30 pm.
• Our south-facing slope had really bad coverage. Existing snow was much more supportable as we descended in the morning than when on our ascent in the afternoon. We stomped on some steep slopes and only saw small rollers as a result. No wet loose avalanches.
• Easterly aspects were becoming more and more unsupportable and wet by 11 am. We purposely shifted to descending a northerly slope to avoid schmoo schwacking down a wet, east slope midday.

The only signs of instability we saw during our tour were small rollers on a south-facing test slope. There are glide cracks just starting to open on a northeast-facing slope around 9,000 ft.

Small rollers on south-facing test slopes in the afternoon.