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Weather Summary

Afternoon wx obs: plenty of sunshine, with periodic passing bands of high clouds. Westerly winds were calm to light, with occasional moderate gusts in upper elevation terrain.

Avalanche Observations

Avalanche Observation Comments:

We could see a good bit of terrain and did not observe any recent avalanche activity

Snowpack Observations

As described elsewhere, the big story here is the very weak snow that has developed at the surface of the snowpack over the past month. Faceting is particularly pronounced in the Galena Summit area and south, where recent snowfall has been basically nonexistent. Periods of moderate to strong sustained winds over the past few weeks have somewhat helped the upper snowpack from developing weak layers, though faceting is present here, just less pronounced. 1/5 weak layer is buried 50-55cm down here and is pretty unimpressive looking. The bond here has strengthened significantly and this layer produced either ECTNs with hard force or ECTXs. Solars have multiple ugly sandwiches of MFcr+FC that are certainly capable of producing avalanches once sufficiently loaded.

Avalanche Problems

We did not directly encounter any avalache problems today. Old, hard wind slabs were unreactive and the terrain we were in was not steep enough to produce facet-lanches

Terrain Use

We comfortably skied avalanche terrain while keeping our eyes peeled for small, reactive wind slabs.