Seattle Ridge

After the warm and wet weather the past week, the snowpack is looking pretty soggy up to about 2800'. The good news is that once this wet snow on the surface freezes, it should add a lot of strength to the upper snowpack and might help the layers of buried surface hoar in the snowpack become very difficult to trigger at treeline elevations and below. Higher up in the alpine, those layers are still a concern, but we didn't see any obvious signs of instability in our snowpit tests. Hopefully we get a little bit of snow on top of these crusts over the weekend so that surface conditions go back to being more appealing. 

The group that went towards the weather station never got above the elevation of the melt freeze crust. The snowpack was capped with about  18" (45 cm) of wet snow, which will turn into a stout crust when the temps drop in the coming days. We didn't see any signs of unstable snow along our route up to a high point of about 2800'. We dug one pit near the edge of the large avalanche crown on Widowmaker from a week ago and found the 11/26 surface hoar layer. In this location it didn't look concerning, but the avalnache already failed on that layer so it likely collapsed already and might not be representative of other locations where the buried surface board could still be intact.  Our other team dug a pit at 2,800. We found the 11/26 buried surface hoar about 1' deep (35cm) and did not get concerning results from our snow tests. There was thin crust that began disappearing at this elevation.