Quick report
Soft snow lies below, Steep slopes above still loom large, Hope that solar heals. Our day consisted of careful route finding and lots of snowpack observation. Everywhere we traveled on south slopes, they harbored hard wind slabs atop increasingly soft snow to the ground. We found ourselves approaching terrain and then subsequently backing off of larger terrain because large pockets of wind slab loomed above, and slopes that had once had no snow now do, telling us they may have shallowly buried trigger points. The Avalanche forecast was spot on. We saw no telltale signs of instability in the new snow, no shooting cracks, no large collapses, and nothing telling us what we needed to know upfront. We used some of our best snow brain cells today to dig into the snow and find what we had set as parameters that would keep us out of terrain: strong over weak snow and propagating ECT results. Unfortunately, we are going to have to continue to remain patient and allow this snowpack to heal. While some lines did get skied from the top, our group decided the risk factors needed to be lowered. Low likelihood and high consequence just wasn't a poker hand we were willing to play.
Weather
- Air Temp
- 30
- Cloud Cover
- clear
- Wind Loading
- previous
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
Splitter weather day.
Snowpack
Strong over weak snow pack structure; newly formed hard wind slabs -> sitting on top of soft storm snow -> atop substantial graupel layer at pit location. South slope, 4590', 32 degree slope near lobster claw. Propagating ECT results failing in the moderate tap range, this failure occurred on the graupel layer and was planar in characteristic, the crack propagated abruptly showing the amount of energy stored in the snowpack.