Quick report
It was the warmest day of the week thus far and a great day to get out for fieldwork. We managed to make our way to the top of Microwave Hill without overheating the sleds and then found some nice ski turns in recycled pow on the N-E side of the hill. The top of the snowpack is faceting and weakening but not currently an issue. Although the day was warm, we did not note any signs of wet snow instability.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 20
- Cloud Cover
- clear
- Wind Loading
- none
- Recent Snowfall
- 0
- Snow Avail For Transport
- none
There were a few wispy clouds here and there throughout the day. Temperatures remained below freezing, even as we went up in elevation but the day felt noticeably warmer compared to days earlier in the week. The wind was calm-light and from the north.
Snowpack
Throughout the day, the snow remained cold, even on solar slopes. We were pleased to find that crusts are beginning to break down in some areas and good skiing/sledding can be found in surface snow that is faceting. These areas are primarily on open, northerly slopes at middle and upper elevations. We also noted widespread large surface hoar grains on most aspects and elevations that we observed as well as some evidence of old wind transport at middle elevations.
We dug a pit on an east aspect at 4800 ft. The depth of the snowpack at this location was 85in/216cm and the depth of our pit was 50in/126cm. We found 6in/14cm of faceted snow at the surface overlaying the one-finger hard 01/10 melt freeze crust. While hard, the 01/10 crust is pretty brittle. We found about 4in/9cm of faceting rounds just below this crust. The rest of the snowpack was large slabs of rounded grains with some very thing melt freeze crusts interspersed within. We did not find near crust faceting around these other crusts. We performed extended column tests and got moderate-hard, non-propagating results either above, within, or below the 01/10 crust (ECTN11, ECTN18, ECTN12, ECTN25).