Roman Nose

The snowpack has undergone notable change from the most recent warm up. Upper snowpack layers over top our two, primary weak layers of concern are stiffening by the day and we are also observing less reactive snowpack tests. More recent strong winds have built stiffer layers near the surface that could fail in isolated, deeper drifts. Despite these changes, if you do find the shallow trigger spot on a slope with weaker snow below, the ensuing slide would likely be large versus small.

The type and quality of snow surface conditions varies greatly between shady and sunny slopes. We found a mixture of soft and firm, but textured surface conditions on shady slopes, and ski penetration was generally 4 to 5 inches deep. Sunny slopes harbored a newly formed sun crust that varied in thickness, but was generally an inch thick. Softer snow layers were immediately below the crust on sunny slopes. Digging on a northwest aspect around 6,200 feet the total snow depth was around 175 cm. Both surface hoar layers, the V-Day and 1/28 layers, showed evidence of rounding and did not fail in any CTs. We observed easy PC/ SP failures in CTs around 15 cm deep, breaking in a thin layer of near-surface facets. We only observed one CTSC 30 failure that broke in large faceted grains below a rain crust from either late December or early January. Leeward slopes and more exposed areas near ridgelines had a 3 to 5 cm thick, 1F hard layer of drifted snow on the surface that was stubborn to ski pressure. We did not travel above 6,300 feet into more alpine terrain and suspect this stiffer surface layer is more broadly distributed across leeward facing terrain and slopes.