Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
The weather was cold and mild in Bishop Creek. If winds were strong near the crest, they only had clouds to blow around.
If the weather forecast verifies for this area, and Bishop Creek sees up to 4 inches of new snow by tomorrow afternoon, it will fall and drift onto the facets and crusts.
Be sure to read the photo captions for additional information.
Localized cracking and one shooting crack in very thin, very small wind slabs cracking on near-surface facets above a melt-freeze crust on several aspects.Weather
- Air Temp
- 19
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- none
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
Decreasing clouds. Cold temps. Winds below 9500' decreased throughout the day. No blowing snow anywhere. A brief moment of very light snowfall. Pretty nice day in the mountains. Drove up towards Mammoth after skiing looking for blowing snow: none anywhere.
Snowpack
All aspects near and below treeline were covered in a melt-freeze crust. The crust didn't soften before I left at 1:30 pm.
There are near-surface facets above and below the crust. A patchwork of small recent wind drifts were sensitive because they were sitting on the facets.
With not a lot going on in Bishop Creek I decided to add to our snowpack data set in anticipation of spring warming. I dug on a southwest aspect and found weak faceted layers sandwiched between very hard melt-freeze crusts. There were even facets at the surface on this aspect.