The day started with quite a bit of sunshine in the WRV, with clouds increasing through the day. Cold all day, with a light to moderate wind blowing out of the S/SW throughout the afternoon. Low, fast-moving, scrappy clouds provided periods of sun and clouds in the afternoon. The combination of wind and clouds kept most snow surfaces from heating up. Some very light snowfall started in the late afternoon, with no accumulation.
We observed several small avalanches that involved the new snow. At least three appeared to be slab avalanches failing in somewhat sheltered terrain.
Primary objectives were to look at amount of new snow and amount of wind transport and to look over at the Soldiers, where 15" of snowfall were recorded the previous day. Unfortunately, low clouds prevented us from seeing anything in the Soldiers. 15-20cm of new snow has accumulated around Dollarhide. The upper half of the new snow was quite low density, with lots of large, delicate, dendritic PP at the surface. It felt like much of this had fallen without wind, or accompanied by only light winds. Wind speed ticked up a bit today, and active transport was observed off and on through the afternoon. There was a bit of effective slab construction going on near ridgelines, but it didn't feel like the wind was blowing hard enough or consistently enough to produce a widespread problem, though I suspect you could find some unstable wind slabs if you went looking for them.
We dug in two locations to look at weak layers in the upper few feet of the snowpack. On solars (E/SE@8600') we found several crusts+facets in the upper snowpack. One of these, down 40-45cm, produced ECTP 15, 15, and 11. This was likely the layer responsible for the large collapses reported above. On a shaded slope (NE @8800') we found very, very weak faceted snow (F--) underlying the new snow from the past few days. This layer produced ECTN 9, 10, and 10 and is very likely to produce avalanches with more loading. The small slabs reported above and pictured below likely involved snow that looked like this.
The combination of cold temperatures and clouds today prevented the snow from getting warm/wet. Even in steep, rocky, solar terrain it did not seem like there was much solar-initiated loose snow shedding today. This is still on the menu for tomorrow.