Beard Canyon/The Gorgeous Couloir

It was nice to get out again for a day in the Inner Basin. Unfortunately, the snow continues to melt. There were a few dry sections on our approach. All southerly slopes in the Inner Basin are mostly bare ground; even some of the last holdouts, like The Zipper Chutes and The Crystal Palace (Cutoff Chutes), are now unrideable (See photo). Today, in our travels, we noticed that any slope that receives sunshine has a melt/freeze crust.  Most of the soft snow of shady, northerly slopes has become weak recrystallized, faceted snow. It was easy to kick off small, loose dry (faceted) sluffs in very steep terrain, close to 40°.  The sugary faceted snow made for challenging uphill skinning. 

I dug a pit out in steep terrain in the middle of The Gorgeous Couloir, at 10800', below the choke. With the generally low avalanche danger conditions and observations from the skin-track today, I felt comfortable with the exposure. See snowpit photo. With alternating crusts/ice and facets, the structure is terrible. A single compression test revealed potential failure planes, which will be a problem if significant new snow ever arrives. See photo. 

The ride down was mostly fun. The best snow was down on the lower-angle slopes below the couloir. Here is the start of Miguel's ride down, starting just below the choke in the couloir. If ya look close, you'll notice the loose faceted snow moving down slope. Video by Michael Gelfeld. 

It's thin, and the snowpack is melting (sunny slopes) and rotting/faceting on shady/northerly slopes. But hey, remember this time last year? There was No Snow! 

We had some cracking today on northerly slopes where old thin wind slabs were resting on near-surface facets. The cracking was very short (<2'), and only in one kick-turn switchback did the crack shoot about 8' out from my ski. See photo. These thin wind slabs (~2" thick) are close to 1 week old or more, so these should now be considered thin persistent slabs. In general, these thin, cracking slabs were stubborn and unreactive.