Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
Many shooting cracks though wind-drifted snow on a single test slope near treeline where we also ski cut several small wind slab avalanches.
Weather
- Air Temp
- Near Freezing
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- intense
- Rain Elevation
- 7500
- Recent Snowfall
- 5-10
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Light to moderate snow showers throughout the day. Moderate to strong westerly winds causing moderate to intense blowing snow. Periodic clearing in the afternoon.
Snowpack
- Except in the most favored areas where wind slabs stretched across start zones, it was a patchwork of drifted snow across crusty slopes.
- See photo captions for the upper snowpack structure in sheltered near treeline terrain.
- Windward slopes were scoured down to bare ground or melt-freeze crusts at all elevations.
- Warming temps were consolidating the new snow, but no cracking without wind loading; not storm slabs yet.
Avalanche
- Size
- D1
- Type
- SS
- Count
- 3
- Aspect
- N
- Trigger
- AS
- Elevation
- 9800 ft
The avalanches we triggered were soft slabs about 15 cm thick breaking at the new/old interface, which consisted of soft new snow sliding on K hard melt-freeze crusts. There were a few small (0.5 mm) near-surface facets on top of the crust.