Incline Lake Peak

As the sun angles and air temperatures have increased this week, the snow coverage on the sunny southerly facing slopes has decreased. The melting of these aspects is more noticeable in this first week of February. Many south-facing slopes now have large areas of exposed dirt and rocks on them in the Incline Lake Peak area. Continuous patches of snow cover still exist, but they keep getting smaller. The snow conditions on these sunny slopes remain consistent: firm, melt-freeze snow in the morning that softens to corn as the day warms up. The spring-like melt-freeze conditions extended to the SE and SW aspects on Incline Lake Peak today. 

Northerly aspects still have a mix of refrozen tracks in most places, wind-affected surfaces in exposed areas, firm, uneven snow under the tree canopy, and patches of soft, cold snow in untravelled areas. Some of the wind textures have also softened as the surface snow on these cold, shady aspects continued to weaken (facet).

Across all of Incline Lake Peak, the best conditions exist where the smoothest snow surfaces linger. Those may be on sunny slopes where melt-freeze cycles have smoothed things out, or on cool, shady slopes without previous tracks, or where the snow surface has weakened enough for the old tracks to disintegrate.

We ski cut several steep slopes with wet snow on them without triggering any wet snow instabilities. On the northerly aspects, we found weak snow on the surface with nothing on top of it.