Quick report
- Cracking
- specific
Today was a very quiet day in the Snoqualmie backcountry. We skied two lines in the Kendall Adventure Zone and didn't see any other people and only one set of recent tracks. The day started out quite sunny and was calm and quite hot in the sun, with trees starting to shed their snow by 10:00 a.m. or so. However by the early afternoon the clouds came in and settled around the summits and we had isolated moments of whiteout. There are between two and six inches of snow on top of a firm crust, with the new snow depths increasing at higher elevations. The skiing was decent but we definitely readily found the bottom, making for suboptimal skiing on top of refrozen debris in various places. Generally we saw few signs of instability except for fairly widespread minor wind slab formation on Northern aspects that were not sheltered. We saw a lot of cracking but nothing seemed to propagate much or have much energy, with the exception of one ceack slab that failed in the switchback of our skin track that was maybe six or seven feet across but did not slide (see photo)