Quick report
- Cracking
- isolated
The wet and heavy snow created some complex snowmobile riding that ate up time allotted to ascend to the ridgeline of Hard Cheese. So unfortunately, we were unable to achieve most of our fieldwork goals for the day. Nonetheless, we still found small indicators of instability here and there and got eyes on new terrain. The cheese eludes us until next time...
We observed one natural that may have released recently. We got very minimal cracking in storm snow and wind loaded snow. We easily triggered numerous roller balls as we skinned along slopes but nothing turned into a full blown wet loose avalanche. "Pushing" on wet snow in the afternoon showed some indications that you could trigger a wet snow avalanche in very steep terrain.Weather
- Air Temp
- 24 to above freezing
- Cloud Cover
- overcast
- Wind Loading
- unknown
- Rain Elevation
- 2900
- Recent Snowfall
- 35
- Snow Avail For Transport
- small smounts
In the morning, there was a solid inch of slush on the ground and it was lightly raining. As we ascended on sleds, precipitation stopped. During our ascent on skins, precipitation started up again and increased to moderate snowfall by the time we returned to the sleds in the afternoon. Temperatures were warm down low, but dropped to 24 degrees when we got above 5000 ft. The wind was calm with some light gusts and the sky was overcast throughout the day.
Snowpack
There was somewhat inconsistent snow coverage below 3000 ft. The snow was wet and heavy below 4000 from rain and warm temperatures. Between 4000-5100 ft, it remained quite moist and dense.
We dug a pit on a southeast aspect at 5100 ft. The depth of the snowpack at this location was 124in/315cm and the depth of our pit was 39in/100cm. We found 14in/35cm of first hard new and recent snow overlaying a four finger hard crust. Below this crust was a large slab of fist to four finger hard rounded grains which overlayed the thick and robust AR crust buried 31in/79cm. We performed an extended column test and got a moderate non-propagating result within the new/recent snow but it nearly propagated to the end (ECTN11).
Avalanche
- Size
- D2
- Aspect
- NE
- Trigger
- N
- Elevation
- 4800 ft
I observed one large natural avalanche across the drainage. With low visibility, it was hard to gauge how recent the slide released but it could have been in the last 48 hours. It released in a wind loaded area on a northerly aspect.