Flat&Deep

Today we avoided all avalanche terrain and snowmobiled in a flat meadow (simple terrain) at treeline with no avalanche slopes above. It snowed continuously throughout the day. Rain below 1100m and snow above this elevation with moderate SW winds. The wind and new snow were building storm slabs on all aspects above 1400m. We dug a snow profile in the meadow at 1550m to investigate the snowpack. The snowpack is 175cm deep. We found several failure planes but did not produce any propagating Extended Column Test (ECT) results. Notably we found a layer of buried surface hoar 100cm deep and were able to produce a sudden planar compression test (CT) result on this layer in one area (shady aspect) but not in another (more solar aspect). We found 25cm of soft (4 Finger) storm slab which failed up to 25cm deep during easy taps from the wrist in CTs. This slab sits over several denser layers of well-bonded round grains. We were also able to produce broken results during moderate taps from the elbow 45cm deep on a preserved layer of stellar crystals and decomposing fragments.