Snug Harbor to Lost Lake

We rode around the Snug Harbor/Lost Lake area today. We were able to take care of some much-needed maintenance on the weather station (it still needs more), got a good survey of surfaces and recent avalanche activity, and dug a few pits in the V-Max area. 

The wind has hammered the area. There is still some soft snow to be found, but you have to work for it. We saw evidence of widespread avalanche activity from the recent outflow winds, and identified a layer of facets below a recently formed crust that will be something we'll be paying close attention to for now.

Serious wind damage from the winds over the past week. There were some isolated pockets where we could still find some soft snow, but for the most part it was trophy sastrugi, pencil hard wind slabs, wild snow dunes, wind-scoured crusts. It felt like riding on another planet.

We dug three pits around the V-Max area, between 2400 and 2500'. One was in a previously wind loaded location, one was more or less sheltered, and the third was near a scoured ridge. We got unstable test results in all three pits, failing on a thin layer of facets below a crust that was about a foot deep. We're thinking this crust formed sometime during the 1/25-1/26 storm. With crusts like this it's hard to say if the stability test actually represents unstable conditions, but this is a layer we'll be paying close attention to over the next few weeks.

See photos for more detailed snowpack info.