Quick report
• Today's tour took us into middle and upper elevations in the Southern Whitefish Range. This area picked up an additional 8cm since yesterday. The new snow is slightly denser than in previous days (Fist+ hardness). • We poked into inconsequential upper elevation leeward slopes to search for wind slabs. Winds were light on ridgetop and not quite strong enough to transport any recent snow. Very minor saltation observed. No recent wind slab development observed. • On solar aspects we discovered a thin pencil hard sun crust (1.5cm thick) that had formed yesterday afternoon. Breakable, but developed enough to affect the skiing quality a little. This crust was very thin to non-existent above 6500', and also did not exist on sheltered areas with larger/tighter tree coverage. • We noted the present structure in the upper pack to be suboptimal/concerning, as we look ahead to an active weather pattern with significant snowfall expected in the coming days. On the underside of the sun crust, we observed a thin layer of near surface facets and 16.5 cm of fist hard snow sandwiched between the early Feb knife hard crust. (Picture attached). • We believe the early February crusts is primed to become the bed surface of a persistent slab avalanche problem early next week if the incoming weather forecast verifies, and we receive abundant snowfall. Loose Dry Problems persist on all aspects at middle and upper elevations.
Snowpack
• Today's tour took us into middle and upper elevations in the Southern Whitefish Range. This area picked up an additional 8cm since yesterday. The new snow is slightly denser than in previous days (Fist+ hardness). • On solar aspects we discovered a thin pencil hard sun crust (1.5cm thick) that had formed yesterday afternoon. Breakable, but developed enough to affect the skiing quality a little. This crust was very thin to non-existent above 6500', and also did not exist on areas with larger/tighter tree coverage. • We noted the present structure in the upper pack to be suboptimal/concerning, as we look ahead to an active weather pattern with significant snowfall expected in the coming days. On the underside of the sun crust, we observed a thin layer of near surface facets and 16.5 cm of fist hard snow sandwiched between the early Feb knife hard crust. Picture attached. • We believe the early February crusts is primed to become the bed surface of a persistent slab avalanche problem early next week if the incoming weather forecast verifies, and we receive abundant snowfall.