Beehive Lake

Overall conditions remain steady despite recent light snowfall. From our travels into upper elevations, we found that recent winds have been light enough to stave off fresh slab formation. This could all change with an increase in wind speeds as ample light snow sits on the surface on shady, protected slopes near 6,000 feet and above. We continue to monitor the evolution of buried weak snow layers and they remain surprisingly intact. The slab above also continues to get stiffer by the day. This is masking snowpack feedback and requiring a dig to investigate approach to evaluate the chances to trigger a slide. If this task is too difficult, simply avoid steeper slopes as the large consequence of triggering a slide still dangle in the wind.

Traveling up in elevation on skis starting at 4400 feet  we observed a breakable surface crust transition to a wet decomposing crust and the recent rain line at about 4900 feet. At this elevation the upper snowpack was moist snow. Near 6000 feet, about 2 cm of recent snow was observed on top of a varied crust, mostly supportable on skis.

At 6800 feet on an East aspect, the snowpack height was 260 cm. We observed  8 cm of recent snow on top of a paper thin crust, and a total of 20 cm since March 3. This 20 cm sat on top of a Pencil hard 15 cm thick layer of snow likely from wind affect at end of February and/or the warm and sunny period the beginning days of March. Below this, we observed a hard (1F to mostly P hard) and cohesive snowpack down to the V-day (2/14) Surface Hoar and 1/28 interface of surface hoar and small facets. These two layers were down from the surface 93 cm and 120 cm respectively. Both layers show signs of gaining strength and rounding.