Cmon Corbin!

Today the South Rockies team took a chance on riding from Corbin staging and were pleasantly surprised at the quality of access! The recent snow made a big difference for the trail, there was a thin fresh coating of wet snow right from the parking lot! The old grooming held up to the rain reasonably well, only a few patches of thin coverage over dirt. As we climbed towards Rain gauge the snow quality improved steadily and we found 20 cm of dry new snow above 1800 m. Below the new snow there is a supportive crust which made for some slippery riding while getting into the throttle or descending slopes. We did not venture above treeline today. Strong to extreme westerly winds in the alpine made for uncomfortable and potentially dangerous conditions at higher elevations. We observed intense snow transport at ridge tops this morning. Exposed areas are scoured down to ice. Significant snow drifting and deposition is occurring on a variety of aspects in the treeline and alpine. We dug a profile in a sheltered area at 2100 m. Snowpack depth is 220 cm at our profile location. The upper snowpack contains many layers of crust and a variety of snow grain types but is not producing any concerning failures below the recent storm snow. We had easy resistant planar failures of the storm snow/crust interface at CTE 6. No propagating results with ECT. We did not see any evidence of large natural avalanches during the recent rain event. Overall better quality riding than we anticipated. Springtime conditions are beginning to shape up nicely, but the snowpack still needs more time to settle before we would consider stepping out to larger features.