Quick report
- Aspect
- Northwest
- Red Flags
- Wind Loading
- Elevation
- 2987 m
- Slope Angle
- 31°
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>the zipper crust will be the first player as a failing layer or possible sliding surface when new load is added, and because we were looking at a fairly thick pack, the rest of the snow remains strong in the area we were in, but we still ran across some weak faceted snow that we sandboxed through in the trees where the snow as very well protected</p>
a look at our stability tests, sorry for poor light
we found skiing pretty good, despite the loud zipper crust, but it would thicken up on flats and threatened to throw us over the bars.
Don't feel deep slab was an issue in this particular area. The crust will not take much to activate it, did not noted faceting just below it, but snow sitting above it is weaker.
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>winds are already cranking,and where we were, direction was SE, which we found a little odd. Shallow wind slabs with cracking was already starting in the pillows off ridge lines</p> <p>cannot ignore recent past, in extreme terrain with shallow pack, faceted snow on ground remains in the back of our minds, we looked for areas with thicker snowpack and kept our slope angles near 30.</p>
Most noticeable layer was an annoying zipper crust down a couple of inches in general. Thicker on Flats and more southerly aspect, but prevalent almost everywhere including even most north aspects. Probably formed due to very warm days and is now buried just beneath the surface up to 4" down. Beneath that next 20" very strong settle rounds sitting on another crust that was about 2" thick, then from there down the pack is larger grained and slightly weaker for another 20" to the old facet crust lasagna I went into this detail here because my pics were very poor due to flat light.