Quick report
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>No apparent red flags. Just spring MF cycle and a touch of new high density snow on top. Windloading was virtually non-existent. One test profile on a southwest facing slope at treeline revealed some stout crust/facet sandwiches with CTM PC-Q2 down 20cms. We found no other interesting layers and this particular crust was over 1cm thick. There was also an apparent dust layer on the old snow surface from the prefrontal winds ahead of the last major storm.</p>
Below are photos of coverage of the Central and North Group, as well as the slide on Burro Ridge.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>We saw no significant activity and planned our travels according to cloud cover and slope exposure Travelled as far south as Mellenthin and as far north as Manns. Haystack and Tomasaki were our east/west boundary. Of note was one old crown below the east facing cliffband of Burro Ridge. It looked like this could have been from wind loading during the last major storm (3/30?) and we could hardly see the debris pile as it had been covered/smoothed out. The crown appeared to be about 12-18" deep and several hundred feet wide. Other than that, we couldn't even get a pushalanche going on steep solars and the norths were welded in place. We did find a large swath of aspens that had been destroyed by the slide on SE Haystack during the end of December.</p>
Variety of snow conditions. Most were skiable. Despite the totally obscured skies at the beginning of the weekend, the Solars skied quite well due to a lack of total refreeze the first night. Then once the sun came out Sunday, the 1-2" of new graupel that had insulated the old snow surface was creamy and edgable (Creamed Corn?) Norths were a mixed bag, but on the exposed slopes of Mellenthin there was some scoured wind crust that made turning sporty. Snow in the trees was primarily an isothermic cesspool that made skinong difficult at times. Although the one solid refreeze on the night of the 10th did help with that somewhat.