Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
We chose conservative terrain for our travels and snowpack assessment. We found 50 cm of storm snow. There was a moderate amount of windloading out of the North and West, but once below ridgelines, there was little wind affected snow.
We saw 3 Natural Large Avalanches. We found the wind loading East and South aspects today. We found some test slope features along ridgelines that were sensitive wind loaded pockets.Weather
- Air Temp
- 21
- Cloud Cover
- broken
- Wind Loading
- light
- Rain Elevation
- 4500'
- Recent Snowfall
- 50 cm
- Snow Avail For Transport
- large amounts
Clear in the morning, clouds developed around 11 am . Temperatures were in the high teens to low twenties. A few snow flurries in the afternoon.
Snowpack
Settled storm totals of 50 cm/16" was found at the Norway Yurt since Saturday 1/3/26. We targeted a zone that would likely have the weakest snowpack structure to dig a pit and a couple snowpack tests. We found 175 cm of total snow height. We got propagation on an ECT on the 25th hit. It failed on graupel sitting on a melt freeze or rain crust. We found the 12/26 crust to be 65 cm from the surface with 50 cms of rounding facets below that. The 12/18 crust is near the ground and was a laminate of crusts and weaker snow that was about 20 cm thick.
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Type
- SS
- Aspect
- S
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 7193 ft
We saw two Large (D2) avalanches on Corunucopia Peak. They looked like storm slabs that were likely running on a crust. One on a South aspect, and one on an East aspect. We also saw a D2 wind slab on the SW face of Red. This looked to have been a cross-loaded wind slab. Based on storm totals near 7000', these likely involved 12-16" of storm snow. In a later snowpit on a North aspect at 7,000', we got full propagation on a large column test that failed on graupel above a crust (buried on 1/3/26).