Round Top

We headed out to Round Top area today. The weather was nice throughout the afternoon with warm temps and light variabe winds. The snow was mostly cold in below tree line terrain with occasional pockets of wet surface snow in direct sunlight. Getting out of the trees and into near tree line and above tree line terrain the wind effected snow was more present and scoured alot of the surrounding terrain. We hiked up to the base of Round Top Peak around 9400' on N apsect and dug a pit to investigate the persistent weak layer. We dug in a wind loaded spot with a solid slab above the Dec. 12th facets. The deep tap test did no produce any results scoring DTN. The ECT was also unremarkable with only ECTN results. The PST did show results on the Dec 12th layer scoring 25/100 End @100 down. The slab did collapse but quickly rested moving only an 1/2". The ride out provided good soft snow and made for some enjoyable turns. No other signs of instabilties was observed on our tour.

We dug a pit at the base of Round Top at 9400' on a N aspect. This location was in a obvious wind loaded area and had 135cm of snow. The top ~100cm was wind packed snow with mostly 1F-4F hard snow throughout. The bottom 35cm was the Dec. 12th facet layer that was  dry non-compressible snow. We targeted this layer by performing a deep tap test and had no results DTN. We then performed a PST and got 25/100 End @ 100 down. The slab did collapse but quickly rested moving only an 1/2".  We also did an ECT and had no remarkable results only ECTN.