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Weather Summary

Light, intermittent snowfall for much of the day, with only about 1cm of accumulation by day's end. Light winds with periods of moderate gusts, blowing out of the NW. A fair bit of snow was getting sifted around, but we did not observe any constructive slab building.

Avalanche Observations

Avalanche Observation Comments:

We did not observe any new avalanches, though visibility was poor and we would not have been able to see anything beyond the terrain we were directly in.

Snowpack Observations

No formal obs, just moving through terrain and skiing soft snow. As reported previously, there has been quite a bit of wind damage to exposed upper elevation terrain. However, we did not need to get very far below ridgelines to get into much more sheltered terrain that had largely dodged the effects of the wind. Here, thick stacks of facets have developed over the past few weeks. The worst of this snow is near the surface, buried beneath the most recent snowfall. This snow consists of small-grained facets that are triggerable as dry loose sluffs on slopes steeper than about 40 degrees. These facets become progressively weaker as you descend, with the weakest facets found in lower elevation terrain below the level of the inversion. On slopes that directly face the sun (SE-S-W), one or more crusts with associated facets exist in the upper 30cm of the snowpack. Without a significant slab on top, these layers have not become problematic yet, but they do not look pretty and will likely not react well to the upcoming loading event. Persistent weak layers in the upper snowpack are widespread enough that we will likely be worrying about persistent slab problems in terrain sheltered from the wind once the overlying slab has become thick enough.

Avalanche Problems

We had both small wind slabs and dry loose sluffing on our problem list. We did not encounter either of these issues where they presented as actual problems. Recent wind slabs we encountered were small, relatively thin (up to 15-20cm), isolated, and unreactive.

Terrain Use

We felt comfortable entering steep, consequential avalanche terrain. We did so while managing small wind slabs and small dry loose sluffs.