Quick report
- Red Flags
- Heavy Snowfall
- Red Flags Comment
- <p>Lots of new snow staying in place. Still a problem with deep buried facets below a somewhat stout crust. However must mention because at time the column could not be isolated and would fail on this layer. </p>
Snowpack
- Instability Comment
- <p>See pic of snow pit. Yes, there is still faceted snow buried at depth and just like what everyone has been saying these past few weeks, the layer is quite spatially variable. It not has several stouter layers on top of it so it is bridging and slowly gaining strength. But our snowpits continued to be inconsistent. Sometimes it was easy to get column tests to fail but Extended Column Tests were stubborn with a Q2 shear. No collapsing felt during the day. New snow is very low density so it does not seem to weigh enough to reactivate the deeper faceted layers except in localized areas, but we did not see any of those pockets in this area.</p> <p>If wind were to blow there is PLENTY of snow to be moved around.</p>
I'd say 8" on top of the 20 inches that have fallen since Monday. Maybe more. Trail breaking was easier at lower elevations but when you got up to higher elevations, trail breaking was knee-deep and often a wallow. You needed to be on a steeper slope to get going on skis. Hate to complain, but the new snow was too deep. It will be better tomorrow after the new snow has settled a bit--both going uphill and downhill. New snow is well behaved. Some sluffing observed from sliding off of rocks or trees dropping snow load on steep pitches with sluff running not far and not entraining much new snow and not stepping down at all.